Stay Hungry Stay Foolish Steve Jobs Script

‘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 June12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today atyour commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Inever graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’veever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you threestories 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 thefirst 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. Mybiological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and shedecided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I shouldbe adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to beadopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped outthey decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So myparents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of thenight asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” Theysaid: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my motherhad never graduated from college and that my father had never graduatedfrom high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. Sheonly relented a few months later when my parents promised that I wouldsomeday 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 mycollege tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I hadno idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college wasgoing to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the moneymy 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,but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Theminute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes thatdidn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that lookedinteresting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have adorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned cokebottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at theHare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into byfollowing my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless lateron. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offeredperhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout thecampus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully handcalligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take thenormal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to dothis. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying theamount of space between different letter combinations, about what makesgreat typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artisticallysubtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of anypractical application in my life. But ten years later, when we weredesigning the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And wedesigned it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautifultypography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spacedfonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that nopersonal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I wouldhave never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computersmight not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it wasimpossible 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 dotslooking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So youhave to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Youhave to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the differencein my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to doearly in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two ofus in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. Wehad 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 firedfrom a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who Ithought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the firstyear or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began todiverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board ofDirectors 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 wasdevastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for afew months. I felt that I had let the previous generation ofentrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passedto me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologizefor screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I eventhought about running away from the valley. But something slowly beganto dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Applehad not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still inlove. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned outthat getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have everhappened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by thelightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. Itfreed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started acompany named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love withan amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create theworlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now themost successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn ofevents, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology wedeveloped at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. AndLaurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would havehappened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tastingmedicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you inthe head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the onlything that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to findwhat you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for yourlovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and theonly 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’tfound it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of theheart, 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 lookinguntil you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that wentsomething like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, somedayyou’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and sincethen, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morningand asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I wantto 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 isthe most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the bigchoices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations,all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fallaway 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 avoidthe 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 withcancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed atumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. Thedoctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that isincurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to sixmonths. 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 yourkids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them injust a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up sothat it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to sayyour goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day.Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down mythroat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into mypancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but mywife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under amicroscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a veryrare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had thesurgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facingdeath, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Havinglived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certaintythan when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people whowant to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death isthe destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is asit should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention ofLife. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way forthe 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 sodramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste itliving someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is livingwith the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise ofothers’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important,have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehowalready know what you truly want to become. Everything else issecondary.

When I was young, there was an amazingpublication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the biblesof my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not farfrom here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetictouch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers anddesktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, andpolaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 yearsbefore Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neattools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out severalissues 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. Onthe back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an earlymorning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on ifyou were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. StayFoolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry.Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as yougraduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.