Steve Jobs's speech at Stanford University

I am honored to attend the graduation ceremony with you today. Stanford is one of the best universities in the world. I have never graduated from college. To be honest, today may be the last day of my life before I graduated from college. Today, I want to tell you three stories in my life. It's not a big deal. It's just three stories.

The first story is about how to connect the dots in your life.

I dropped out after six months at Reed University, but after eighteen months -- before I decided to drop out, I often went to school. Why should I drop out of school?

The story begins when I was born. My biological mother is a young, unmarried college graduate. She decided to let others adopt me, and she wanted me to be adopted by college graduates. So at the time of my birth, she had prepared everything for me to be adopted by a lawyer and his wife. But she didn't expect that when I was born, the lawyers and couples suddenly decided they wanted a girl. So my adoptive parents (they are still on the observation list of my biological parents) suddenly received a call in the middle of the night: "We have a baby boy accidentally born here, do you want him?" They replied, "of course !" However, my biological mother later found that my adoptive mother had never been in college, and my father had never even attended high school. She refused to sign the adoption contract. It was just a few months later that my parents promised that she would have asked me to go to college. At that time, she agreed.

At the age of seventeen, I really went to college. However, I chose a school that is almost as expensive as your Stanford University. My parents are still in the blue-collar class and they spent almost all their savings on my tuition. Six months later, I could not see the value. I don't know what I want to do in production, and I don't know what the university can help me find. But here, I spent almost all my parents' savings in my life. So I decided to drop out of school. I think this is the right decision. There is no denying that I was really scared at the time, but now I can look back, it is indeed the best decision in my life. At the moment I decided to drop out of school, I finally don't have to go to those courses that I don't have any interest in. Then I can take courses that seem interesting.
But it's not that romantic. I lost my dormitory, so I could only go to bed on the floor of my friend's room. I picked up a 5 cent cola bottle to fill my stomach. On Sunday evening, I need to walk seven miles through the city to the Hare Krishna temple (Note: located in the lower part of Brooklyn, New York), just to have a meal-the only good meal this week. But I like it.
I followed my intuition and curiosity and met many things that proved invaluable afterwards. Let me give you an example:

At that time, Reed University provided perhaps the best art and character courses in the United States. Every poster in this university, and all the labels in each drawer are beautiful art words. Because I dropped out of school and didn't receive formal training, I decided to take this course and learn how to write beautiful art words. I learned about the san serif and serif fonts, how to change the length of spaces in different letter combinations, and how to make the best print style. It is a kind of artistic subtlety that science can never capture, beautiful, and authentic. I found that it is really wonderful.

At that time, it seems that these things are in my life and there is no practical application. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, that was not the case. I designed all the guys I learned into Mac. It was the first computer to use beautiful printed fonts. If I did not drop out of school at the time, I would not have the opportunity to attend this art class I was interested in. Mac would not have so many rich fonts, as well as pleasing font spacing. So now the personal computer will not have such a wonderful font.

Of course, when I was in college, I could not link my previous moments, but when I looked back on all these things ten years later, I was really very open.
Once again, it is impossible for you to concatenate these fragments as you look forward; you can only link them together when you look back. Therefore, you must believe that these pieces will be linked up one day in the future. You must trust something: your courage, purpose, life, and karma. This process never disappointed me (Let me down.), but made my life more distinctive.

My second story is about love and loss.

I am very lucky because I found my favorite stuff very early. Woz and I started Apple in their parents' garage when they were 20 years old. We worked very hard. Ten years later, the company had grown from the two garages to more than four thousand employees and a large company worth more than 2 billion. In the ninth year of our founding, we just released the best product, the Macintosh. I am almost thirty years old. In that year, I was fired. How can you be fired by a company you created? Well, when Apple was growing fast, we hired a talented guy to manage the company with me. In the first few years, the company was operating very well. However, we had a disagreement on our future views, and finally we had a quarrel. The Board of Directors stood on his side when the quarrel was not open. So I was fired when I was thirty years old. I was fired under the eyes of so many people. At the beginning, all the pillars of my life are far away from myself, which is a devastating blow.

In the first few months, I really didn't know what to do. I have lost my passion for entrepreneurship. I feel frustrated when I let myself start a business together. I met Bob Boyce with David Pack and tried to apologize to them. I made things terrible. But I gradually found out that I still love these things. What happened to Apple hasn't changed at all. I was evicted, but I still love it. So I decided to start all over again.

I was not aware of it at the time, but it turned out that Apple was the best thing in my life. Because the bliss of being a winner is replaced by the ease of being an entrepreneur: not so important to anything. This made me feel so free that I entered the most creative stage in my life.
In the next five years, I created a company named next, a company named Pixar, and met an elegant woman who later became my wife. Pixar made the world's first computer-made animated film "Toy Story". Pixar is now the world's most successful computer production studio. In a series of subsequent operations, Apple acquired next, and then I went back to Apple. We have played a key role in the revival of Apple's technologies developed by next. I also established a happy family with Laurence.

I'm sure that if I don't get fired from Apple, this won't happen either. This medicine tastes so bitter, but I think the patient needs it. Sometimes, life will pick up a brick and snap at your head. Do not lose confidence. I know that the only thing that keeps me going is what I do that I love very much. You need to find what you love. This is true for work and for your lover. Your work will take up a large part of your life. Only by believing that you are doing a great job can you feel comfortable with yourself. If you haven't found it yet, continue searching, don't stop, and search for it with all your heart. You will know it when you find it. Just like any sincere relationship, it will only get closer and closer with the passage of time. So keep searching until you find it. Don't stop!

My third story is about death.

When I was 17 years old, I read a sentence: "If you regard every day as the last day of your life, then one day you will find that you are correct ." This sentence left a deep impression on me. After 33 years, I asked myself in the mirror every morning: "If today is the last day of my life, will you finish what you want to do today?" When the answer is "No" for many times in a row, I know that I need to change some things.

"Remember that you are about to die" is the most important rumor of my life. It helps me specify important choices in my life. Because almost everything, including all honors, all pride, all fear of embarrassment and failure, will disappear before death. What I see is what really matters. Sometimes you think that you will lose something. "Remember that you are about to die" is the best way I know to avoid these ideas. You are naked, and you have no reason not to beat your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I performed a check at half past seven a.m. and the check clearly showed that there was a tumor in my pancreas. I didn't know what the pancreas was. The doctor told me that it is probably an irreparable cancer. I still have three to six months to live in this world. My doctor told me to go home and sort out everything, that is, the procedure for the doctor to prepare for death. That means you will talk about what you say to your child over the next decade in a few months .; that means everything is done, so that your family can live as easily as possible; that means you have to say "goodbye ".

I live with that diagnosis all day. Then one morning I had a live slice examination, and the doctor put an endoscope in my throat, passed through my stomach, and then entered my intestines, I took several cells from a tumor on my pancreas with a needle. I was very calm at the time because I was injected with a stabilizer. But my wife was there and later told me that they started to scream when the doctor observed these cells under the microscope, because these cells are finally a rare pancreatic cancer that can be cured with surgery. I had this operation, and now I have recovered.

That was the time when I was the closest to death, and I also hoped that it would be the closest in the next few decades. From the death line again, when death is just a useful but purely intellectual concept for me, I can say to you more surely: no one is willing to die. Even if people want to go to heaven, they will not die to go there. But death is the end of each of us. No one can ever escape it. This should also be the case. Because death is the best invention in life. It clears the old one to give way to the new one. You are new now, but soon after, you will gradually become old and then be cleared. I'm sorry this is dramatic, but it's very real.

You have limited time, so do not waste them on repeating others' lives. Don't be bound by dogma, it means you live with the results of others' thoughts. Do not be overwhelmed by others' opinions. The most important thing is that you have the courage to listen to your instincts and instructions-they somehow know what you want to be and everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was a magazine called "The Whole Earth's directory", which was one of the Bibles of our generation. It was written by a guy named Stewart Brand in Menlo Park not far from here. He magically brought this book to this world like a poem. It was in the late 1960s s, before the advent of personal computers, so this book was all made with typewriters, scissors, and mirrors. It's a bit like Google wrapped in soft skins. Thirty-five years before Google's appearance: It's idealistic, and there are a lot of clever tools and great ideas.
Stewart and his partners published several issues of the "entire earth's catalog". When it completed its mission, they made the final catalog. That was in the middle of 1970s, your time. On the back cover of the last issue is a photo of the Village Road in the early morning (if you are adventurous, you can find this road by yourself). Below the photo is a line like this: "If you are hungry for knowledge, then you are foolish with an empty mind." This is the farewell message that they stopped publishing. "If you are hungry for knowledge, then you are foolish with an empty mind ." I always hope that I can do that. Now, when you are about to graduate and start a new journey, I hope that you will do the same.

If you are hungry for knowledge, you may be confused (stay hungry, Stay Foolish .).

Thank you very much!