Transcript of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs

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 eighteen 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 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. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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 of 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 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 far more 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 five-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 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 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 that calligraphy class and personals 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. 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.

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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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. 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, and 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.

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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 am 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'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 drown out your own inner voice, 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 Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.

Página Original de donde lo tomé

A pain in the head, a pain in the heart, a pain in the butt.

Before 1800, people in the world were living such a simple life in which no-one was interested in money as the center of their life. After 1800, the world began a series of changes in people’s lifestyle and people’s way of thinking that made the world we know today, which is totally different from what the Renaissance wanted it to mean.

Between the 18th and the 19th century, in the United Kingdom an important part of the world history that we know today as the Industrial Revolution began. It brought with it a set of new mechanical machines that were replacing man’s handwork not only on the farms, but in the cities and financial districts. Before the Industrial Revolution, you could see simple families having simple lives, going together to the vineyards to collect the grapes and make the wine, and getting simple wages just for food. After that, you could see only one man making a whole family work and those families, which in the past were doing jobs for food, now were extremely hungry and looking at how their lives were being destroyed; here came the pain in the heart.

During the 19th century, a couple of inventors began to make more and more sophisticated tools that made people’s life even easier. One inventor was in the patent office, and an hour later another one went to patent a new invention, which was good. The problem was that there was no control in the way they exposed their inventions to the public. It was an era recognized because a little group of people just wanted more and more huge quantities of money or fame, without thinking about the poor people, who at the end were the affected part of the game; here came the pain in the head.




After 1940, the world began to be habitable again, meaning that people were put into their jobs again. They found balanced ways to allow people and machines to work together. But after 1990, people forgot the ideals and began again to be more involved with money. Money, again, became the center of the world. New machines were created to make people’s work faster instead of easier. That means, that if in 1980 you used to prepare 80 informs at the office, nowadays your boss wants you to prepare 800. To this, add the strict environment created by the business aura: just make money for me and I don’t give a fuck about you. That’s a pain in the butt! People need their jobs because from them they can get their money, and they need that money to eat (the first necessity?) and keep their consumer addict lives. So, they work like dogs for nothing and go around the streets stressful and being unpleasant to happy people like me.

Stress is a pandemic we will never eradicate, unless people change their way of seeing the world. Nowadays many people look at the world as a valuable thing, which is totally false. How can I get rich from your ribs? A 100 dollar bill is just a piece of paper that, at any moment, I can rip if I want (logically I won’t), because it can buy a lot of smiles, but not an honest voice saying “hello” to you everyday.


Lugoskyk,
Nueva York, Lunes 2 de Octubre, 2006

The Sad Happiness

A complex entity is the union of many different simple things, which are joined to make the perfect structure to work completely fitted. A human being is the perfect example of what a complex is, because it is a set of emotions followed by material things and sensitive situations that gives strength to it and also a psychological stability. Happiness is also another complex entity that makes as its factors your temperament, your history, your culture, your environment, way of thinking and a couple of objects like for example the weather. For other kinds of people, like me, happiness is not complex; it’s just as simple as a smile and saying “God bless you.”

There are many materialists who find happiness in luxuries like buying many expensive cars or houses, or having the cutting edge technology. Material wealth has a quality of warranty limit, which means that it has to disappear. If the entity that makes you happy flies away, the wind will carry your happiness away to the sky, and it’s very unlikely hat it’s going to come back. It’s like if I love my new MP3 player very much and I let it fall in a water bucket: “Damn, there’s go my happiness!” Material things are useful and important in people’s lives, but it’s not everything like in the quoted case. How can I find my reason for existing in something that is less long-lived than me, and worse than this, how can I find my happiness in something that can’t even talk?

Other kinds of people find happiness by, for example, having sex. They have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 orgasms, but what then? There’s going to be an orgasm that will hurt you, and the others will gradually hurt you more and more. And then, you don’t want more sex for a couple of days; you don’t have the sensations that make you feel great, because those things that once helped you overcome are making you fall. Worse than this is when you get old and your genitals don’t work the same; so, are you going to commit a suicide because you can’t have anymore sex? But this is not only about sex; what about food? You eat so much – because it’s the only thing you love in this world- that you go to sleep and never get up because of a heart attack. And what about those kinds of people who have to be in extremely dangerous situations to feel okay, but at 15,000 feet the parachute doesn’t open: “Damn!” The Swedish philosopher Jostein Gaarden in his book The Solitaire Mystery said, “How stupid is the human being! Always trying to go very high into space, very deep into the sea, but never stopping his trip near a like in a mountain surrounded by some flowers, to admire some of the deepest thins of life.”
There are people who think that they are happy being rational. They have everything calculated and don’t do anything spontaneously. They don’t smile, don’t live their life, don’t spend their time on stupid things, don’t waste their time talking muck with anyone, and don’t laugh for any reason. They are always closed into their rational world and never go out to play in the free environment, and see the sunlight. They are losing the privilege of smiling and feeling how the breeze can caress them. Staying with a grimace of boredom they are condemned to see people like me, pretending to feel superior and getting more and more angry when I do my silly things just because I want a taste of life.

Once there was a man who was dreaming that under the bridge there was a treasure. Suddenly, the man got up and went with a shovel to dig a hole under the bridge. While the man was digging the hole, a policeman was walking around this area. The policeman asked the man what he was doing, and the man told him the story. The policeman told the man that this was a curious situation, because he had had the same dream, but in the policeman’s dream the guy found his treasure under his kitchen. The man went to his kitchen and dug another hole and he found the treasure. People usually look for happiness in the wrong place. You are happy because God lets you be happy, not because you find happiness somewhere, in something, or someone.



Lugosky,
Nueva York, Mártes 17 de Octubre, 2007