Thank you. I'mhonored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finestuniversities in the world. Truth be told. I never graduated from college, andthis is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want totell you three stories from my life. that's it. no big deal, Just threestories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of ReedCollege after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop in foranother eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? Itstarted before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduatestudent, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly thatI should be adopted by college graduates. So everything was all set for me tobe adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out,they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents,who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night, asking, We'vegot an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him? They said, of course. Mybiological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated fromcollege and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused tosign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when myparents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life. Andseventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naively chose a college thatwas almost as expensive as Stanford. In all of my working class, parents'savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't seethe value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea howcollege was going to help me figure it out. and here I was spending all of themoney my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out andtrust that it would all work out. OK, it was pretty scary at the time, butlooking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute Idropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest meand begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting. It wasn'tall romantic, I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor. in friends'rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buy food with, andI would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one goodmeal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it, and much of what I stumbledinto by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless lateron. Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered perhaps thebest calligraphy instruction in the country throughout the campus. Everyposter, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand telegraphed because Ihad dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take acalligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san seriftypefaces, about varying the amount of space between different lettercombinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and Ifound it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical applicationin my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintoshcomputer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It wasthe first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on thatsingle course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces orproportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, its likelythat no personal computer would have them.
If I had neverdropped out,.I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, andpersonal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Ofcourse, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was incollege, but it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later again.you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them lookingbackwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in yourfuture. You have to trust in something your gut, destiny, life, karma,whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down, the road will giveyou the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the wellworn path. And that will make all the difference.
My second storyis about love and loss..I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life.Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was twenty. We worked hard,and in ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a twobillion dollar company with over four thousand employees. We just released ourfinest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier. and I'd just turned thirty. Andthen I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, asApple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the companywith me, and for the first year or so things went well, but then our visions ofthe future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out when we did,our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty I was out and verypublicly out. what had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone and itwas devastating. I really didn't know what to do. For a few months, I felt thatI had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down that I had dropped thebaton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce andtried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and Ieven thought about running away from the valley, but something slowly began todawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had notchanged that. one bit. I'd been rejected, but I was still in love. And so Idecided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that gettingfired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened. To me. Theheaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginneragain, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the mostcreative periods in my life. During the next five years, I started a companynamed Next another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing womanwho would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computeranimated feature film Toy Story and is now the most successful animation studioin the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought next and I returnedto Apple. And the technology we developed at next is at the heart of Apple'scurrent renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I'mpretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimeslife sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't losefaith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I lovedwhat I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work asit is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work,and the only way to do great work is to love what you do if you haven't foundit yet, Keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'llknow when you find it, and like any great relationship, it just gets better andbetter as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
My third storyis about death..When I was seventeen, I read a quote that went something likeIf you live each day, as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly beright. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past thirty threeyears, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if today werethe last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today andwhenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need tochange something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important toolI've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almosteverything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment orfailure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what istruly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I knowto avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are alreadynaked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago, I wasdiagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at seven thirty in the morning, and itclearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was.the doctors told me. this was almost certainly a type of cancer that isincurable and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor'scode for prepare to die. It means to try and tell your kids everything. Youthought you'd have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months. Itmeans to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy aspossible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with thatdiagnosis all day later that evening. I had a biopsy, where they stuck anendoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put aneedle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, butmy wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under amicroscope, the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rareform of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery andthankfully I'm fine now.
This was theclosest I've been to facing death and I hope it's the closest I get for a fewmore decades..having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bitmore certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. Noone wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to getthere. and yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escapedit, and that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single bestinvention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make wayfor the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now youwill gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, butit's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else'slife. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of otherpeople's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your owninner voice and most important have the courage to follow your heart andintuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everythingelse is secondary.
When I wasyoung,.there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, whichwas one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow namedStewart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life withhis poetic touch. This was in the late sixties before personal computers anddesktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroidcameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form Thirtyfive years beforeGoogle came along, It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and greatnotions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the whole Earth catalog,and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was themiddle one thousand eight hundred and seven years, and I was your age. On theback cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning countryroad, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were soadventurous beneath it. Were the words. Stay hungry, Stay foolish. It was theirfarewell message as they signed off, stay hungry, stay foolish, and I havealways wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wishthat for you stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you all very much.
The presidentfirst..members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, membersof the Faculty, proud parents and above all, graduates. The first thing I wouldlike to say is thank you. Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinaryhonour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've endured. At the thought of givingthis commencement address have made me lose weight.
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