Steve Jobs to 2005 graduates: 'Stay hungry, stay foolish'
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs
says
This is the text of the Commencement
address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios,
delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your
commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never
graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to
a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.
That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting
the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College
after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18
months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological
mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me
up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college
graduates, so everything was all set for me to be 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 have an unexpected baby boy;
do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother
later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my
father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final
adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised
that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But
I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of
my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After
six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do
with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And
here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So
I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty
scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever
made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that
didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a
dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles
for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town
every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I
loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and
intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one
example:
Reed College at
that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was
beautifully hand calligraphy. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to
take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to
do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the
amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great
typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in
a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the
first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into
the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never
dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had
multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just
copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had
never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and
personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of
course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I
was in college. 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 looking backwards. So you have to trust that
the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in
something — your gut, destiny, life,karma, whatever. Because believing
that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow
your heart. Even when it leads you off the well worn path, and that will
make all the difference. (This approach has never let me down, and it has made
all the difference in my life.
My second story is 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 20. We
worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a
garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released
our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned
30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started?
Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the
company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions
of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling
out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I
was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult
life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few
months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of
entrepreneurs down- that I had dropped the baton as it was being
passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for
screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about
running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me
— I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that
one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to
start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out
that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened
to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of
being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter
one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a
company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an
amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds
first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most
successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple
bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at
the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have
a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty 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. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a
brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me
going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And
that is as true for your work as it 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 found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.
As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like
any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years
roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about 'Death'.
When I was 17, I read a quote that
went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday
you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since
then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and
asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do
what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been
"No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is
the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make
the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations,
all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these
things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly
important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to
avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There
is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with
cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in
the morning, and it clearly 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 is incurable, 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's code for prepare to die. It means to try to
tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them
in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so
that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your
goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later
that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down
my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my
pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife,
who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the
doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of
pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine
now.
This was the closest I've been to facing
death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when
death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want
to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the
destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should
be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of
Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the
new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will
gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it
is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste
it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with
the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of
others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most
important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They
somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is
secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing
publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of
my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here
in Menlo Park,
and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late
1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made
with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat
tools and great notions.
Stewart 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 the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back
cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country
road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so
adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It
was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
http://mepopedia.com/forum/read.php?33,7604
Structure of the Lead :
WHO - Steve Jobs
WHEN - June 14, 2005
WHAT - Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
WHY - Not given
WHERE - At Stanford University
HOW - Not given
Key words :
1.subtle : 微妙的
2.karma : 因果
3.diverge : 偏離
4.biopsy : 活檢
5.renaissance : 復興
