Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. – Steve Jobs

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 bigdeal. 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 dropin
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
patents 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 5c 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 4000 employees. We had just
released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.
And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple
grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me,
and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to
diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided
with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire
adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous
generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed
to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up
so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the
valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me: I still loved what I did. The turn of
events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love.
And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that
could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by
the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter
one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named
Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went
on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the
most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple
bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the
heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family
together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was
awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the
head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going
was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your
work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only
way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do
great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.
As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you
find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was
your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and
since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked
myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do
today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I
need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to
help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external
expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in
the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that your are going
to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and
it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The
doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I
should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go
home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to
try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in
just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as
easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an
endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle
into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who
was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors
started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is
curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few
more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty
than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get
there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And
that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is
Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is
you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be
cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by
dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of
other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage
to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to
become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart
Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This
was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all
made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in
paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing
with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when
it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.
On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country
road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath
it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they
signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And
now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.