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‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Go to the web site to view the video.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

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 sans 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 10 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 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 backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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 4,000 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 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, 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 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 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 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 1960s, 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 Stanford Commencement Speech Transcript 2005

Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, gave a commencement address at Stanford University for the class of 2005. Read the full transcript of the June 12, 2005 commencement speech here.

Transcribe Your Own Content Try Rev and save time transcribing, captioning, and subtitling.

Steve Jobs: ( 00:21 ) 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’d I drop out? It started before I was born.

Steve Jobs: ( 01:15 ) 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 02:13 ) 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 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 03:04 ) 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 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 Hari 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 sanserif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

Steve Jobs: ( 04:03 ) 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 10 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. 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 04:58 ) 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 05:38 ) My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I love 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 4,000 employees. We just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 06:28 ) 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 07:04 ) The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected, but I was still in love. 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’ve 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 07:49 ) In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next and I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. 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’s 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 08:21 ) You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for 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. 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 09:04 ) 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. 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? 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 10:11 ) 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 11:00 ) 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 doctor 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

Steve Jobs: ( 11:40 ) 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. 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 12:14 ) 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 drowned 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 13:08 ) 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 60’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, 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.

Steve Jobs: ( 13:52 ) 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. 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.

Speaker 1: ( 14:56 ) The preceding program is copyrighted by Stanford University. Please visit us at stanford.edu.

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Steve Jobs: Stanford commencement address, June 2005

This is a prepared text of the commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs , CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on 12 June, 2005.

**The commencement address is one of the more venerable – and respectable – traditions of American academia, especially at elite universities such as Stanford and Harvard. Because Steve Jobs died at such a relatively young age (56) this is destined to be regarded as a classic. But it faces stiff competition – as the list maintained by humanity.org testifies. Jobs's address is up against Barack Obama's lecture to Wesleyan University in 2008, Elie Wiesel's talk at DePaul University in 1997, Václav Havel's lecture on "Civilisation's Thin Veneer" at Harvard in 1995 and George Marshall's address to the same university in 1947 – to list just four. But Jobs's address has an unbearable poignancy just now, especially for those who knew him well. John Gruber, the blogger and technology commentator, saw him fairly recently and observed : "He looked old. Not old in a way that could be measured in years or even decades, but impossibly old. Not tired, but weary; not ill or unwell, but rather, somehow, ancient. But not his eyes. His eyes were young and bright, their weapons-grade intensity intact." The address also reveals something of Jobs's humanity, something that tended to get lost in the afterglow of Apple's astonishing corporate resurgence. **

" I am honoured 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 [Portland, Oregon] 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 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.

** This is interesting because for many years Jobs was extremely reluctant to discuss his family background in public. He was asked about it in the famous Playboy interview in 1985 , for example, and refused point-blank to go into it.**

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.

** One of the most interesting back stories of the modern computing and IT industry is how many of its pioneers were college dropouts. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, for example, both left Harvard in mid-term, and one of Gates's proudest boasts is that he was responsible for persuading Steve Ballmer (now Microsoft's CEO) to drop out of Stanford. The list continues with Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and Michael Dell, founder of the computer firm that bears his name. And although Google's co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, did graduate, they both dropped out of their PhD programmes. This rather runs against the conventional narrative – that an expensive college education and a good degree are essential prerequisites for success. **

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 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 sans 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 10 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 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 10 years later.

** One of the things that everyone who knew Jobs says is that he was obsessed with "taste". He was always ranting against Microsoft because they " had no taste " and one of his great early insights was that computers would become consumer products and, as such, would have to be attractively designed and easy to use. **

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 [Steve Wozniak] 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 $2bn company with over 4,000 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.

** Jobs hired John Sculley, who had been CEO of Pepsi, the drinks company, in the mistaken belief that having an experienced chief executive would free him to do what he really loved doing – which was creating great products. His pitch to Sculley to persuade him to leave Pepsi was: "John, do you really want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water?" In the short term, appointing Sculley looked like the defining, catastrophic error of Jobs's life. But – with the 20/20 vision of hindsight – he came to see it differently. The idea that getting fired might be a good thing is a bracing idea for young graduates, even Stanford ones. **

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 apologise 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, I returned 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.

** Again, a rare insight into his personal life. In a moving tribute his friend Stephen Wolfram recalls seeing this side of Jobs for the first time. "One time I went to see him in NeXT's swank new offices in Redwood City," he recalls. "I particularly wanted to talk to him about Mathematica as a computer language. He always preferred user interfaces to languages, but he was trying to be helpful. The conversation was going on, but he said he couldn't go to dinner, and actually he was quite distracted, because he was going out on a date that evening – and he hadn't been on a date for a long time. He explained that he'd just met the woman he was seeing a few days earlier, and was very nervous about his date. The Steve Jobs, so confident as a businessman and technologist, had melted away, and he was asking me – hardly a noted known authority on such things – about his date. As it turned out, the date apparently worked out – and within 18 months the woman he met became his wife, and remained so until the end." **

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, some day 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 tumour 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 tumour. 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 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 is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but some day 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.

** This breaks the first rule of contemporary American culture – never talk about death. Work out, lose weight, don't smoke, eat carefully. It's a wonderful, liberating break from that infantile, stultifying convention. One wonders if it made his audience shift nervously in their seats. **

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.

** Jobs never allowed the opinions of others to drown out his own "inner voice". One of my favourite stories about him is about the moment when the Apple design team presented him with the first version of the iPod . He looked at it for a while, turned it over and over, weighed it in his hand and then said: "It's too big." The engineers protested that it was a miracle of state-of-the-art miniaturisation – 1,000 songs packed into that tiny space. Jobs walked over to the fish tank in the corner of his office and dropped the prototype into the water. He then pointed to the bubbles that floated from it to the surface and said: "That means there's still some space in it. It's too big." End of conversation. **

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 1960s, 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.

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Why steve jobs' commencement speech still inspires 10 years later.

• The Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address is a finely crafted speech because it’s emotional, inspiring, and simply structured.
• Although it wasn’t held at a TED conference, Jobs’ speech had all the elements of an inspiring TED presentation
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Steve Jobs wasn’t always the confident showman he seemed to be on stage during his famous keynotes. On the morning of June 12, 2005, hours before Jobs was scheduled to deliver the commencement speech for the 114 th graduating class at Stanford University , “He woke up with butterflies in his stomach,” says his wife, Laurene, in Becoming Steve Jobs . “I’d almost never seen him more nervous.”

The speech meant a lot to Steve Jobs. He had practiced the speech endlessly, often talking out loud as he walked around the house. He gave the speech several times during family dinners, taking advantage of the captive audience.  The best speeches and presentations—those that connect deeply with another person’s soul—are best written from the heart. At 22 million views on YouTube, Steve Jobs’ commencement speech did connect deeply with millions of souls around the world.

The Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address is a finely crafted speech because it’s emotional, inspiring, and simply structured.

Although it wasn’t held at a TED conference, Jobs’ speech had all the elements of an inspiring TED presentation , which might explain why the video of the speech has garnered 8 million views on TED .com.

The speech was short. The speech lasted for just fifteen minutes. As the TED conference has learned in its 30-year history, 15 to 18 minutes is an ideal length of time to deliver a substantive message without putting an audience to sleep. A lot of powerful messages have been delivered in under 18 minutes. John F. Kennedy inspired a nation in 15 minutes and Martin Luther King shared a vision of racial equality in 17 minutes. On a TED stage, Sheryl Sandberg took 15 minutes to deliver a moving and powerful speech that launched the movement Lean In .  Fifteen minutes is enough time to spark a movement.

The speech had a theme that resonates with just about everyone who seeks meaning in their lives and their career: Do what you love. “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,” Jobs said.

Jobs wrapped three lessons in three stories. Readers of this column know that I’m a fan of the ‘rule of three.’ Dividing a message into three parts or stories is a simple, memorable, and effective technique to structure a message.

“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories,” Jobs began.

Jobs’ first story was about connecting the dots. He talked to the graduates about dropping out of Reed College so he could “drop in” to the courses he wanted to take, like calligraphy, a course that no practical application to his life. Ten years later he incorporated what he had learned into the design of the Macintosh. “It was the first computer with beautiful typography…You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. You have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Jobs’ second story was about love and loss. He recalled falling in love with computers at an early age, meeting Steve “Woz” Wozniak, building Apple, and losing Apple after a falling out with the Board of Directors. “Getting fired was the best thing that could ever happened to me…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.”

Jobs’ third and final story was about death. “Remembering that are you going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

The speech emphasized triumph over adversity. Each of the three vignettes from Jobs life involve struggle or sacrifice. Stories of triumph over struggle resonate with audiences because humans are hard-wired to empathize with one another, and stories are the vehicles through which we share these common bonds. Stories help transport listeners to another world, allowing them to see to themselves in the speaker’s shoes. Once they’re connected to a speaker, an audience is more likely to follow the speaker’s advice or buy in to their idea.

Steve Jobs saves his call to attention for the end of the speech: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

A few years ago I met an entrepreneur who had given up a lucrative job to pursue an idea for a tech company. He was making a very high salary and I asked him where he had found the courage to quit. He pulled a paper from his bag and passed it across the table. I immediately recognized it as the printed text of the Jobs commencement speech. “This gave me the courage to follow my heart,” he said.

A great speech can give people courage they didn’t know they had. The Jobs speech has been inspiring people for a decade and will continue to do so, convincing many more people to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

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3 lessons from Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech 18 years ago that still resonate today

• Apple's Steve Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.
• He told three stories about love, death, and following your gut. 
• It's been 18 years since Jobs delivered the speech, and the lessons he shared continue to resonate.

Some of Steve Jobs' most iconic quotes came from a commencement address on June 12, 2005. 

Speaking to the graduating class of Stanford University , the Apple cofounder and then-CEO told three stories that connected lessons he'd learned in his life to advice for the new graduates. 

Jobs died in 2011 at the age of 56. 

Eighteen years later, the 15-minute speech continues to resonate, offering useful advice on life and work for people of all ages.

Here are the three big lessons Jobs shared: 

'Trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future'

Jobs' first story explained why he decided to drop out of college. 

After six months in school, Jobs said he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, and he couldn't see how college was going to play a role. Rather than spend his parents' money, he dropped out. 

"I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK," Jobs said in the speech. 

Instead, Jobs said he started "dropping in" on classes that interested him.

"Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on," Jobs said.

That included a class on calligraphy that taught Jobs about typeface and design, which would later play a role in building the Mac personal computer. 

"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," Jobs said. 

Connecting the dots between a calligraphy class and the design of the Mac wasn't something Jobs could see at the time when he dropped out. 

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"You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future," Jobs said. "You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever."

'Find what you love'

The second story Jobs told recounted the time he was fired from Apple. 

In 10 years, Jobs and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak had gone from running a business in a garage to a $2 billion company, Jobs said in the speech. 

But at 30, Jobs was forced out of the company. 

"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," Jobs said.

Jobs said in the speech that it led to a creative period in his life, in which he started two companies and fell in love. Later, Apple bought one of the companies, and Jobs returned to Apple. 

"Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith," Jobs said. "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."

If you haven't found what you love yet, Jobs said, "Don't settle." 

"As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."

'Death is the destination we all share'

Jobs' final story of the commencement speech revealed what he went through when learning of his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Jobs died of complications related to the cancer in 2011.

Jobs said since he was a teenager, he had used the motivation of living each day like it might be your last to help him make big choices. 

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Jobs said. "You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

When Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, he was initially told the cancer was incurable and that he had only months to live. Later that day, he said, a biopsy revealed the cancer could be treated with surgery. "I had the surgery and thankfully I'm fine now."

But the near-death encounter gave him certainty, he said, of what he wanted to share with the graduates. 

"Death is the destination we all share," Jobs said. "No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life."

That is, it's important to make sure you're living true to you. 

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," Jobs said, adding, "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."

After his three stories, Jobs left Stanford's 2005 graduating class with parting words he learned from the final issue of a 1970s publication: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

You can watch the full speech here:

Watch: Steve Jobs left Apple to start a new computer company. His $12 million failure saved Apple.

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7 Lessons from Steve Jobs' Commencement Speech

Sahil Bloom

October 5, 2022, mindset & life lessons, today at a glance.

• I'm a big believer in the value of re-consuming the books, ideas, and content that have deeply moved you. While the content may not change, you do, so your experience with it changes. You'll pick up new perspectives and insights each and every time.
• Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University is one such piece of content. I watch this speech at least 2x per year. With each viewing, I have new learnings and takeaways. While Steve was far from perfect (all too human, just like the rest of us), the wisdom in his words has impacted me profoundly over the years.
• This piece contains 7 lessons and quotes from a legendary commencement speech that has stood the test of time.

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I'm a big believer in the value of re-consuming the books, ideas, and content that have deeply moved you.

In recent years, it has become a socially acceptable adult flex to talk about how many books you've read in a given year. Trust me, I've done it. You can wow people at a cocktail party by rattling off facts from the 52 books you read last year.

But what I've come to realize is that reading 52 books is much less impressive than reading one book and being fundamentally changed by it.

As a rule of thumb: You may read thousands of books in your life, but there will only be a few that deeply change the way you think. The same applies to ideas and content more broadly.

With books, ideas, and content, I have found that the Pareto Principle (20% of the inputs create 80% of the impact) is inadequate.

In fact, I would argue that 1% of the consumption inputs create 99% of the impact.

When I find one of those top-1% items, I re-consume it religiously (at least once per year). While the content may not change, you do, so your experience with it changes. You'll pick up new perspectives and insights each and every time. It's a beautiful, formative thing.

In today's piece, I'd like to walk through one item on my top-1% list:

Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.

I watch this speech at least 2x per year. With each viewing, I have new learnings and takeaways. While Steve was far from perfect (all too human, just like the rest of us), the wisdom in his words has impacted me profoundly over the years. Even if you aren't a fan of the man, I would encourage you to take in his words.

Here are 7 lessons and quotes from a legendary commencement speech that has stood the test of time...

Question the Assumptions

"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."

Independent thinking is a rare superpower of the modern age.

To carve your own path—in your career or life—you have to develop your own views. You can't be constrained by the way things have always been done—by the false tradeoffs or base assumptions that others have told you to believe.

Some of the worst decisions I've made in life were grounded in "that's how it has always been done" thinking.

Learn to question the basis of anything that doesn't feel right to you.

Don't chart your course through life based on someone else's map.

Question the assumptions. Develop your own views.

Let Curiosity Guide You

"And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on...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...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 10 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."

This newsletter is called the Curiosity Chronicle, so I naturally feel compelled to talk about the impact of intellectual curiosity.

Life is a mysterious expanse that we're tossed into without a flashlight or guide. We hope that our parents, family, friends, or mentors can help, but the reality is that we have to figure most of it out on our own.

Curiosity can be your guide—but only if you embrace it.

It's hard to predict, but when you pursue learning with genuine, inspired curiosity, good things tend to happen. It's a mysterious and powerful force—one you should always have on your side.

Let curiosity guide you.

Have Faith in the Dots

"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 backward 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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."

The concept of "dots" has been one of the most impactful ideas in my life over the last decade.

We are just a series of "dots"—moments, decisions, successes, and failures. Our lives are the line that connects through them.

The struggle is that it's often impossible to see that line as you place new dots. The complexity of the world obscures the connections.

Much of life, therefore, requires a terrifying leap of faith. A grounded belief that those dots will connect—somehow, someway.

And yet, as terrifying as it may be, they do. Time and again.

Always, always have faith in the dots.

Go Back to the Starting Line

"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."

After being fired from Apple, Steve Jobs felt the weight of a tremendous public failure that most of us will never experience. He had been fired from the company he founded, after all.

Interestingly, the public failure led to a sort of Renaissance period in his life.

It's easy to allow the burden of external forces to drain your life. The pressures of being late in the race, with high expectations and a buildup of fatigue, bear down on you.

When you find yourself in that position, think back to how you felt as a beginner—the lightness of that moment.

Metaphorically or literally, go back to the starting line.

Never Settle

"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."

In your career (and life), if you have the luxury of choice, never settle for less than love.

Low tolerance for uncertainty is one of the greatest drivers of settling. We are wired to fear the uncertainty—so we choose to settle to escape it.

Resist this urge and temptation: Tolerate uncertainty for a bit longer than you otherwise would.

Never settle.

An important note: Sometimes you have to settle short term in order to not settle long term. If you're building a skyscraper, the first step is to dig a hole and pour a rock-solid foundation. That's not sexy or fun, and it may feel like settling, but doing the dirty work early will allow you to build the stunning architectural masterpiece of your dreams later.

Memento Mori

"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."

One year before this speech, Steve Jobs had survived a scare with pancreatic cancer. It was a visceral reminder of his mortality and the inescapability of death.

But rather than darkness, this close encounter brought light…

Life is simultaneously both very long and very short.

Many of us ignore the shortness of life : We then get caught up in the stresses and fail to recognize that our precious days are slowly fluttering away.

Our time is finite, but we often fail to recognize it until it's too late.

Remember that you must die. Memento Mori.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

"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...Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

The fight against normalcy is perhaps our most important fight in life.

Growing up, I feared being different—I desperately wanted to fit in. This desire led to bad decisions grounded in insecurity.

I only realized later: Being different is your edge—your ultimate competitive advantage. No one can compete with you, at being you.

We all need to fight back against “fitting in”—fight back against normalcy.

The world wants you to be normal and play by the rules. You have to fight—consistently and diligently—to maintain your uniqueness.

Steve Jobs recognized this as well as anyone in the world. So it was fitting that he closed with his most famous line (and the line I will leave you all with today):

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

These are 7 powerful lessons from one of the most wisdom-rich speeches of all time.

If you haven't watched the full video of the speech, carve out 15 minutes and thank me later. It will change the way you think about your career, life, relationships, and more.

The full text of the speech can be found here .

I'd love to hear from you:

• Which lesson stands out the most?
• What other lessons did you take from the speech that are missing?

Tweet at me @SahilBloom and I'll do my best to get back to everyone.

As always, until next time...stay curious, friends!

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Here's the full text of Steve Jobs' famous Stanford commencement speech

YouTube/Stanford

It's a well-known speech, and one of Jobs' most notable public appearances. It's a short speech, but it still highlights Jobs' considerable strengths as a storyteller and inspirational leader. 

On Wednesday, current Apple CEO Tim Cook and other people close to Apple  memorialized Jobs , who died five years ago. 

Read the speech: 

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 sinceWindows 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 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 returned 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 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 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 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 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.

Watch the speech below: 

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Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech: Rhetorical Analysis and Main Points

• by Anastasiya Yakubovska
• 16.08.2022 12.05.2023

The famous commencement speech to Stanford graduates “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” is direct proof that Steve Jobs was a talented public speaker. 

From the article, you will learn what principle this motivational speech is built on and what rhetorical and stylistic devices Steve Jobs used.

Table of Contents

Why did steve jobs give the commencement address at stanford.

• Did you know? 
• Structure of Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech 
• The Tone of Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech 

What Rhetorical Devices (Figures and Tropes) Did Steve Jobs Use in Stanford Commencement Speech

Steve jobs’ commencement speech: 5 key points.

Steve Jobs, like no other, knew what success is. But he also was well aware of how difficult it is to find yourself, your purpose, and your dream job. 

Over the 56 years of his life, Jobs mastered several professions (without graduating from university), founded not one, but three companies – Apple Computer, NeXT, and Pixar Animation Studios.

Absolutely deservedly and rightly so, Steve Jobs was invited to Stanford University, California. Stanford is ranked among the top universities in the world. Therefore, Steve Jobs faced quite a challenge – with his motivational speech to help students make the right choice and to direct them to the right path.

Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address

Photo: stanford.edu

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs gave his famous commencement speech “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish!” to Stanford graduates. 

Did you know?

The text of Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement address is hidden in the Apple.txt system file on Mac.

“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.”

This is how Steve Jobs begins his famous speech : clearly, honestly, and frankly, thus disposing to himself and focusing everyone’s attention.

Of course, Steve Jobs was a gifted public speaker (remember his successful presentations of Apple products). Therefore, like any professional speaker, Jobs used rhetorical devices, figures, and literary tropes in his speeches.

Read more about rhetorical devices in the post “How to Write a Persuasive Essay and Article: Complete Guide”.

Structure of Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech

Steve Jobs’ speech has a classic structure and consists of 3 parts:

• Introduction . 

The introduction includes a greeting and a short preface:

2. The main part.

These are the three stories from Steve Jobs:

“ The first story is about connecting the dots.”

“My second story is about love and loss.” 

“My third story is about death.”

At the end of each story, Steve Jobs draws a conclusion and emphasizes the main idea. For example:

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.”

3. Conclusion:

“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.”

The Tone of Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech

The tone of the commencement address and the style of presentation are informal (colloquial) with elements of slang:

“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.” 

Steve Jobs knows and understands his audience very well, talks about simple but important things: family and studies, friends and love, career, ups and downs, life and death.

Steve Jobs’ speech lasted 15 minutes – the perfect time by all the canons of an oratory.

Rhetorical Analysis of the Commencement Speech: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

Steve Jobs used three modes of persuasion in his Stanford commencement address – ethos, logos, and pathos.

Used ethos to build trust and gain the favor of the public:

“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.” 

“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.”

“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, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.”

Logos is a mode of persuasion using logic, common sense, and reason:

“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 4,000 employees.”

“But 10 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 this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

Steve Jobs used pathos to emotionally amplify his speech and evoke the necessary response from the public:

“ 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.”

“ 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 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.” 

“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.”

“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.”

In addition to the basic modes of persuasion, Steve Jobs, a brilliant speaker, used several rhetorical devices in his motivational speech. Let’s consider some of them:

• The rule of three is a rhetorical device that involves the expression of thoughts through three words or phrases. 

Of course, the most striking example of the rule of three is the idea of the commencement speech itself – three stories from Steve Jobs’ life. 

More examples of the rule of three (triad):

• “It was beautiful , historical , artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.” 
• “ 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.” 
• “This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters , scissors and Polaroid cameras .” 
• “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.”

2. Antithesis is the opposition of words, concepts, and images that are interconnected by common features (contrast):

“If I had never dropped out , I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class…” 

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward ; you can only connect them looking backward .” 

“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner.”

“I had been rejected, but I was still in love.”

“because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life… It clears out the old to make way for the new .”

3. A rhetorical question is a question-statement that does not require a direct answer:

• “I really quit. So why did I drop out?” 
• “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?” 

4. Anaphora is the repetition of the same initial words or sound combinations:

• “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” 
• “ 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.”
• “ 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 I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.” 

5. Lexical repetition is a stylistic figure that consists of the deliberate repetition of the same word or speech construction in a visible section of the text:

• ” 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.”
• “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories .” 
• “about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great .” 
• “But it was very , very clear looking backward 10 years later.”
• “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 this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”
• “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 .”
• ” 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.”
• “Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.”
• “This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades.” 

6. Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonants in several words:

• “I was l ucky — I found what I l oved to do ear l y in l ife.”
• “The heaviness of b eing successful was replaced b y the lightness of b eing a b eginner again, less sure about everything.” 
• “all f ear of embarrassment or f ailure — these things just f all away in the f ace of death…” 

7. Comparison :

“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.” 

8. Metaphor is a hidden comparison, the use of words in a figurative sense based on similarity and analogy with the characteristics of some object or phenomenon (a waterfall of stars, a wall of fire, a pearl of art, a bear of a problem).

Metaphor gives imagery to speech, helps to keep the listener’s attention, and influences their imagination:

• “It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” 
• “the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.” 
• “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.”
• “these things just fall away in the face of death…” 
• “This was the closest I’ve been to facing death…” 
• “There is no reason not to follow your heart”. 

9. Parallelism is the identical or the same construction of various words or sentences of the text:  

• “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 this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”
• ” 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.”
• “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… Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
• “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.” 

In conclusion, I would like to highlight 5 main points that Steve Jobs wanted to convey to graduates of Stanford University:

• Listen to your heart, do not follow someone else’s advice.
• Sometimes you just need to “go with the flow” – to trust God, fate, intuition, or circumstances. And then, looking back – into the past, you will be able to understand why all these events happened in your life.
• Sometimes the worst thing that happened in your life can lead to the best events and changes in the future.
• Do you want to be happy? Love what you are doing.
• The memory of death cleanses a person of all that is unnecessary. Our time is limited. So always “stay hungry, stay foolish”.

Text of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech

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Steve Jobs Commencement Speech Analysis

Looking for Steve Jobs commencement speech analysis? Want to understand how Jobs uses ethos, logos, pathos, and figurative language? Take a look at Steve Jobs Stanford speech analysis below.

Introduction

• Speech Analysis
• Rhetorical Appeals Used

Is it necessary to follow passions or reasons while choosing a career? What effects can losses and failures have on a person’s life? In spite of the complex character and deep ethical, philosophical, and psychological meanings hidden in these questions, they are answered completely in Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005.

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, Inc., is known as one of the world-famous and successful entrepreneurs whose unique approaches to business and marketing provoked the great public’s interest. That is why Jobs’ speech on the importance of finding an interesting and loved job drew the attention and gained the recognition of the graduates during the Commencement Day at Stanford University in 2005.

Steve Jobs Stanford Speech Analysis

The goal of Steve Jobs’ speech is to persuade the graduates to find jobs that they can truly love because of their passion for definite activities. Thus, Jobs is successful in achieving his goal because of his exclusive approach to structuring the speech and to blending the rhetoric appeals in order to discuss well-known concepts and ideas of love, loss, and death in a unique form; that is why it is appropriate to examine Jobs’ manipulation of methods of persuasion in detail.

In his speech, Jobs demonstrates the virtuous use of rhetoric appeals in the development and presentation of one of the most persuasive commencement speeches in order to draw the student’s attention to the significant questions which can contribute to changing a person’s life.

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech: Rhetorical Appeals

The strategies used in developing the structure of the speech and the rhetorical strategies are closely connected. Jobs’ speech can be divided into five parts which are the introductory part to evoke the graduates’ interest regarding the topic discussed, the three life anecdotes, and the concluding part, which restates and supports the author’s arguments presented in the main part of the speech.

It is important to note that each of the three stories told by Jobs is also developed according to the definite structure pattern where the first sentences of the stories can be referred to the pathos, the personal experience can be discussed with references to the ethos, and the final parts of the stories are organized as the logical conclusions, using the logos.

The first reference to ethos is observed in the introductory part when Jobs states, “I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation” (Jobs).

The uniqueness of Jobs’ approach is in the use of the reverse variant of the ethos as the rhetorical appeal because Jobs has no credibility to discuss the importance of university education, but he has the credibility to discuss the points necessary for professional success because of stating his position as the co-founder of Apple, Inc., NeXT, and Pixar.

The next three stories presented in the speech are used to develop Jobs’ argument about the necessity of doing what a person loves and the importance of finding these things and activities. This argument is developed with references to the concluding or logical parts of the author’s stories which are also highly emotional in their character. Steve Jobs uses pathos in the first sentences while telling his stories.

Thus, the discussion of the details of the child adoption in the first story, the reflection on the happiness of building the first company, and the mentioning of the main question in life, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”, contribute to the audience’s emotional reaction because of describing the author’s own feelings and emotions (Jobs).

The credibility of Jobs’ considerations depends on the presentation of his own personal and life background and experiences to support his ideas. The use of pathos in the speech is observed when the author concludes with the results of his experience: “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” (Jobs).

Discussing the near death experience, the author uses the sentence “About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer,” which combines the ethos and pathos strategies (Jobs). Thus, Jobs can use more than one rhetorical appeal in a sentence.

Nevertheless, Jobs’ goal is to persuade the graduates to act and find the things that they love to do, and the focus on logos is observed in the stories’ concluding sentences when Jobs provides the logical argument: “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” (Jobs). These concluding remarks are based on the logical rethinking of the evidence and facts presented as examples from the author’s experience.

The repetition of such phrases as “Don’t settle” and the final phrase, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” contributes to drawing the audience’s interest in the presented facts and ideas (Jobs). The effectiveness of using rhetorical appeals depends on the author’s style and his use of repetitive structures and imperative sentences, which sound persuasive.

In his speech, Steve Jobs achieves the main goals of the speech by focusing on ethos, logos, and pathos and by using the author’s unique style. Jobs presents his developed vision of his career and passions in life with references to the ideas of love and death and supports considerations with autobiographical facts.

Works Cited

Jobs, Steve. ‘You’ve Got to Find What You Love,’ Jobs Says: Text of the Address . 2005. Web.

Further Study: FAQ

📌 what is the purpose of steve jobs’s commencement speech, 📌 what is the ethos in steve jobs’s commencement speech, 📌 what is another commencement speech example, 📌 what was the tone of steve jobs speech at stanford university.

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Full Transcript Of The Steve Jobs Commencement Speech At Stanford University: An Uplifting Message For All

The 2005 Steve Jobs commencement speech from Stanford University is a testament to his remarkable storytelling abilities and a reminder of the power of words.

In 2005, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs delivered the commencement speech at Stanford University . A powerful orator, Jobs’ brief address is a testament to his exceptional storytelling and motivational abilities. This speech is widely regarded as one of his most memorable public appearances.

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech Transcript

Steve jobs commencement speech.

For the structure of Jobs’ speech, he decided to share three short stories from his life. Here’s the full transcript of the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford University.

Here’s the full transcript of the famous Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech.

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, it’s 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 4,000 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 returned 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 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 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 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 ($50+ via Amazon) , 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(Amazon link) 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 commencement speech at Stanford University (2005)

With its short but powerful words, Steve Jobs showcased his powerful strengths as both a leader and a storyteller. Several lines from his speech, including “ Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life ,” are frequently quoted to this day.

For anyone else giving a commencement speech, Jobs set the bar pretty high. If you’re even trying to come close, good luck!

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Frank Wilson is a retired teacher with over 30 years of combined experience in the education, small business technology, and real estate business. He now blogs as a hobby and spends most days tinkering with old computers. Wilson is passionate about tech, enjoys fishing, and loves drinking beer.

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