00:00Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
00:10The first story is about connecting the dots.
00:15I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.
00:23So why did I drop out?
00:26It started before I was born.
00:28My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
00:36She 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.
00:46Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
00:52So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking,
00:56We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?
01:01They said, of course.
01:03My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.
01:13She refused to sign the final adoption papers.
01:17She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
01:22This was the start in my life.
01:27And 17 years later, I did go to college.
01:30But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford.
01:36And all of my working class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
01:41After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.
01:45I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
01:50And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.
01:56So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.
02:01It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
02:06The 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 far more interesting.
02:18It wasn't all romantic.
02:20I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms.
02:24I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with.
02:28And I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
02:35I loved it.
02:38And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
02:44Let me give you one example.
02:47Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
02:52Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed.
02:59Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes,
03:02I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
03:07I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces,
03:10about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations,
03:14about what makes great typography great.
03:16It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture.
03:24And I found it fascinating.
03:26None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
03:31But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer,
03:36it all came back to me.
03:37And we designed it all into the Mac.
03:40It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
03:43If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,
03:47the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
03:51And since Windows just copied the Mac,
03:53it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
03:57If I had never dropped out,
03:59I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class.
04:01And personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
04:05Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
04:10But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
04:14Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward.
04:17You can only connect them looking backwards.
04:20So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
04:24You have to trust in something.
04:26Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
04:29Because believing that the dots will connect down the road
04:32will give you the confidence to follow your heart
04:35even when it leads you off the well-worn path.
04:38And that will make all the difference.
04:43My second story is about love and loss.
04:48I was lucky.
04:50I found what I loved to do early in life.
04:53Waz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20.
04:56We worked hard.
04:58And in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage
05:01into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
05:05We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier.
05:09And I'd just turned 30.
05:11And then I got fired.
05:14How can you get fired from a company you started?
05:17Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented
05:22to run the company with me.
05:23And for the first year or so, things went well.
05:26But then our visions of the future began to diverge.
05:28And eventually, we had a falling out.
05:30When we did, our board of directors sided with him.
05:34And so at 30, I was out.
05:36And very publicly out.
05:38What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone.
05:41And it was devastating.
05:43I really didn't know what to do for a few months.
05:45I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down.
05:49that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.
05:52I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.
05:58I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the valley.
06:03But something slowly began to dawn on me.
06:05I still loved what I did.
06:08The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
06:13I'd been rejected, but I was still in love.
06:16And so I decided to start over.
06:19I 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.
06:25The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.
06:32It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
06:36During the next five years, I started a company named Next, another company named Pixar,
06:41and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
06:44Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story,
06:49and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
06:52In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple,
07:00and the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
07:04And Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
07:08I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
07:13It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
07:17Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick.
07:21Don't lose faith.
07:23I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
07:27You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.
07:33Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
07:35and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
07:39And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
07:43If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle.
07:47As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.
07:51And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.
07:56So keep looking.
07:58Don't settle.
07:59Daddy Bradford
08:00My third story is about death.
08:05When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like,
08:09If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.
08:16It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years,
08:21I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself,
08:24if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?
08:29And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
08:34Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered
08:40to help me make the big choices in life.
08:43Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure,
08:50these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
08:56Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
09:03You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
09:09No one wants to die.
09:12Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.
09:16And yet, death is the destination we all share.
09:20No one has ever escaped it.
09:22And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.
09:29It's life's change agent.
09:30It clears out the old to make way for the new.
09:34Right now, the new is you.
09:36But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
09:42Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true.
09:46Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
09:51Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
09:57Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
10:01And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
10:05They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
10:10Everything else is secondary.
10:13Stay hungry.
10:15Stay foolish.
10:16Stay foolish.
10:16You
Comments