Steve Jobs's speech at the Denver Graduation Ceremony (1)

Today, I am very honored to meet you at the graduation ceremony of one of the best universities in the world. I have never graduated from college. To be honest, this is my closest graduation from college. Today, I just want to talk about three things in my life. That's it. It's not a big thing, it's just three stories.
The first thing isConcatenate the dots in your life. I dropped out after six months at Reagan University, but I stayed at the school and stayed for 18 months as an uninvited guest. Why did I drop out of school? The reason is from my birth. My mother is a young unmarried female college student. She decided to give me to someone else for adoption. She thought that I must be adopted by someone with a college culture level, so a couple of lawyers said they wanted to take me in and everything was okay, but when I was born, they said they wanted a girl at the last moment. So my current parents, who were waiting for a person, received a call in the middle of the night: "Is there a boy here, do you want to adopt? "They said," Of course ". But then my mother found that my mother did not graduate from college, and her father did not even finish high school. She refused to sign the adoption agreement, but a few weeks later, when my parents promised me to go to college, she agreed. At the age of 17, I went to college, I had chosen an expensive university like Denver, and my parents were working class. They spent almost all their savings for my studies. Six months later, I don't see any value of my college, I don't know what I want, and I'm not sure whether my college can help me find it, and I spent my parents' life saving in learning correction, so I decided to drop out of school and believe it was okay. At that time, I still felt a little scared, but when I looked back at it all, dropping out of school is definitely one of the best decisions I have ever made.
After I drop out of school, I will not go to the annoying required courses and attend the courses I like. Of course, it doesn't look so romantic. I don't have a place to go to bed, so I can only sleep on the floor of my friend's dormitory. I picked up a jar for five cents to fill my stomach. I walked seven miles every Sunday night and went through town to get a delicious dinner at the church, I like this very much. At that time, what I learned with my own interests and intuition became invaluable. Let me give you an example. At that time, Reagan University offered the best calligraphy course in China, each poster on campus, the labels in each drawer are completed in a very beautiful handwriting font. Because I dropped out of school, I don't have to go to those required courses. I decided to take this calligraphy class and learn how to design those beautiful letters. I learned serif and San-serif fonts, I learned how to change the gap between letters in a letter combination, and how to make the layout more perfect. All these are beautiful, classical, artistic, subtle, and scientific. They are really fascinating, but they do not bring any hope to my real life, ten years later, when I was designing the first Apple computer, everything was rewarding. Let's put all those designs into the Apple Computer, it was the first computer in the world to have a beautiful font layout. If I had never heard of the course in college, then Apple would not have so many fonts and proportionally designed fonts, because Windows only copies apple, no one in the world may own those beautiful fonts. If I do not drop out of school, I will never be able to learn that calligraphy course, personal computers may not have any beautiful fonts.
Of course, it is almost impossible for me to connect all of this in college, but when we look back 10 years later, everything will become very clear. I will repeat it again, you cannot predict the impact of future events on you. You can only connect those moments in your life at the beginning, therefore, you must believe that everything in your life will be associated with your future, and you must believe in something-intuition, fate, karma, and so on. This idea has never disappointed me, and my life has changed.