Lesson 6 Do What You Love
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered this commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.
The following is slightly adapted from his address.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement.
I never graduated from college. 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.
I stayed around for another eighteen months or so before I really quit.
So why did I drop out?
I chose a college that was very expensive, 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, so I decided to drop out and trusted that it would all work out okay.
The minute I dropped out I stopped taking the required classes that didn't interest me.
I began dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity turned out to be priceless later on.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
In a calligraphy class, I learned about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, and about what makes great typography great.
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.
If I had not dropped out, I would have never dropped in on the calligraphy classes, 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.
My second story is about love and loss.
Woz and I started Apple when I was 20. We worked hard, and in ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a two －billion －dollar company.
We had just released 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 to run the company with me.
Eventually we had a falling－ out.
Our directors sided with him.
So at the age of 30, I was out.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months.
I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from Silicon Valley.
But I realized I still loved what I did, 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.
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 whom I would marry.
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.
I returned to Apple. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
Sometimes bad things happen to you.
Don't lose faith.
The only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
You've got to find what you love.
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.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like "Live each day as if it were your last."
It made an impression on me, and since then, every morning I have 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.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.
The doctors told me that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months and that I should get my affairs in order.
Later it turned out to be a very rare form of cancer that is curable with surgery.
I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
No one wants to die, and yet death is the destination we all share.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Don't let 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.
When I was your age, I saw these words on the back cover of the final edition of a magazine:
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish." It was their farewell message.
I have always wished that for myself, and I wish that for you.
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