Thank you.



I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the
finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from
college, and 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 six 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
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've got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They
said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to
college. This was the start in my life.



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 okay. 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 far more 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 five cent deposits to
buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 calligraphed. 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, it's
likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped
out, I would have never dropped in on that 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 10 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.



My second story is about love and loss.



I was lucky -- I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz1 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 two billion
dollar company with over 4000 employees. We'd 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. And 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 world's 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, and I retuned 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. Sometime life -- Sometimes life going to hit 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 -- and 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 -- 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've
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 and 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 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, thankfully, I'm fine now.



This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's 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's 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's 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 60s, 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,
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've 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.