"You've Got To Find What You Love"
This is text of a speech by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar
Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at
sharing it here and hoping that few young souls might find it
enlightening... the video from youtube shall be added in the left side of the blog...keep reading...its pretty old but yes inspiring
“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
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:
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 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 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 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was
created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in
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 Catalogue,
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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