ENGLISH SPEECH _ STEVE JOBS_ Stanford Speech(English Subtitles)-(480p)
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:07I'm
00:13honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest
00:16universities in the world.
00:21Truth be told, I never graduated from college
00:26and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
00:33Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life.
00:37That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
00:41The first story is about connecting the dots.
00:46I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months,
00:50but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.
00:55So why'd I drop out?
00:58It started before I was born.
01:01My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student
01:05and she decided to put me up for adoption.
01:08She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,
01:12so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
01:18Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
01:24So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking,
01:29We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?
01:34They said, Of course.
01:37My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college
01:42and that my father had never graduated from high school.
01:45She refused to sign the final adoption papers.
01:50She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
01:56This was the start in my life.
02:00And seventeen years later, I did go to college.
02:04But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford.
02:09And all of my working class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
02:14After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.
02:18I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
02:24And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.
02:30So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.
02:35It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
02:41The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me
02:47and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
02:52It wasn't all romantic.
02:54I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms.
02:58I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with.
03:02And I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night
03:06to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
03:10I loved it.
03:12And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
03:19Let me give you one example.
03:22Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
03:27Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed.
03:34Because 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.
03:42I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations,
03:49about what makes great typography great.
03:52It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture.
03:59And I found it fascinating.
04:01None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
04:07But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.
04:13And we designed it all into the Mac.
04:16It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
04:19If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
04:27And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
04:32If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class.
04:44And personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
04:48Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
04:53But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
04:57Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward.
05:00You can only connect them looking backwards.
05:03So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
05:07You have to trust in something.
05:09Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
05:12Because believing that the dots will connect down the road
05:15will give you the confidence to follow your heart
05:18even when it leads you off the well-worn path.
05:21And that will make all the difference.
05:23My second story is about love and loss.
05:35I was lucky.
05:36I found what I loved to do early in life.
05:39Was and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20.
05:42We worked hard, and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage
05:47into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
05:51We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned 30.
05:57And then I got fired.
06:00How can you get fired from a company you started?
06:03Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me.
06:10And for the first year or so, things went well.
06:12But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out.
06:17When we did, our board of directors sided with him.
06:20And so at 30, I was out, and very publicly out.
06:24What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
06:29I really didn't know what to do for a few months.
06:33I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down,
06:37that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.
06:40I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce, and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.
06:46I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.
06:51But something slowly began to dawn on me.
06:54I still loved what I did.
06:57The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
07:01I'd been rejected, but I was still in love.
07:04And so I decided to start over.
07:07I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple
07:11was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
07:14The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,
07:19less sure about everything.
07:21It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
07:24During the next five years, I started a company named Next, another company named Pixar,
07:29and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
07:32Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story,
07:37and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
07:43In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple,
07:48and the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
07:53And Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
07:56I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
08:02It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
08:06My third story is about death.
08:18When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like,
08:22If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.
08:27It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years,
08:34I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself,
08:37If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?
08:43And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row,
08:47I know I need to change something.
08:49Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered
08:55to help me make the big choices in life.
08:58Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure,
09:05these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
09:11Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
09:18You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
09:24About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer.
09:28I had a scan at 7.30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.
09:34I didn't even know what a pancreas was.
09:37The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable,
09:42and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
09:46My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.
09:54It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months.
10:02It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.
10:08It means to say your goodbyes.
10:12I live with that diagnosis all day.
10:15Later that evening, I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines,
10:22put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.
10:26I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying,
10:34because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
10:40I had the surgery, and thankfully, I'm fine now.
10:52This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.
10:58Having 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.
11:07No one wants to die.
11:10Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.
11:14And yet, death is the destination we all share.
11:18No one has ever escaped it.
11:20And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.
11:27It's life's change agent.
11:29It clears out the old to make way for the new.
11:32Right now, the new is you.
11:35But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
11:41Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true.
11:45Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
11:50Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
11:56Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
12:00And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
12:05They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
12:09Everything else is secondary.
12:11When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation.
12:31It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
12:40This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras.
12:48It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.
12:54It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools, and great notions.
12:59Stuart 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.
13:07It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.
13:13On 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.
13:23Beneath it were the words, stay hungry, stay foolish.
13:28It was their farewell message as they signed off, stay hungry, stay foolish.
13:35And I have always wished that for myself.
13:39And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
13:44Stay hungry, stay foolish.
13:47Thank you all very much.