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 June 12, 2005
>
>
>I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the
>finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be
>told, 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 6 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 college 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do
>you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out
>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 someday 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 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 OK. 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 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 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would
>walk the 7 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, its likely that no personal computer
>would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in
>on this 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 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. You have to
>trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This
>approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my
>life.
>
>   My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky ­ I found what
>I loved to do early in life. Woz 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 $2 billion company with over 4000
>employees. We had 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. 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 worlds 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 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. Sometimes life hits 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. 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 until you find it. 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 have
>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 to 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 and 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 I'm
>fine now.
>
>   This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its
>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 is 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 is 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 other's 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 1960's, 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, and 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 have 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.
>_____________________________

____________________
>
>Steve Jobs
>CEO, Apple
>CEO, Pixar