Stanford Commencement Speech 2005
Welcome back, incredible BookDuck fans. Did you know that hard work and determination help you achieve your goals? Let's hear the real-life example of Steve Jobs, who gave a speech at the 2005 Stanford commencement ceremony.
Steve Jobs, who unfortunately died in 2011, was a businessman, investor, and, as we all may know, the CEO of Apple. He is no longer with us, but his legacy will live forever.
Let’s hear the three stories that shaped him as a person.
Connecting the dots
The first one he calls "Connecting the dots." Jobs begins by sharing his story of how he dropped out of college after the first six months and the reason for his drop out he connects back to before he was born. He was put up for adoption because his mother was a young and unwed college graduate student. She wanted him to be adopted by college graduates, which meant everything was set for him to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Even though the adoptive parents wanted a girl, they still decided they wanted a baby boy. However, Jobs' biological mother refused to sign the papers when she discovered the wife never graduated from college. A few months later, she finally agreed to sign when the new parents promised he would someday attend college.
Seventeen years later, he did go to college. But, he chose a college that was very expensive, like Stanford, and all of his working-class parents' money was being spent on his college tuition. After six months, he started not seeing the value in it. He had no idea about his life and how college would help him figure out anything. And here he was, spending all of his parents' saved money. So, he decided to drop out and trust himself that everything would work out for him. Even though it was scary, now that he looks back on it, it was the best decision he had ever made. He now had the freedom not to take the required classes that were not interesting for him, and he began to explore the interesting ones.
It wasn't all going great, though. He didn't have a dorm and had to sleep on the floors in his friends' rooms. He returned Coke bottles for 5-cent deposits to buy food and walked seven miles across town every Sunday to get one meal a week from his favorite place. But guess what? He loved it. Now that he looks back, everything he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
He gives an example of this by talking about Reed College and the calligraphy class they offered. He called it the best in the country, and so he joined because he dropped out of the other courses. He gave it a try, and to him, it was beautiful, historical, and artistically subtle in a way that science couldn't capture. But at that time, he didn't think he would apply his knowledge of calligraphy to anything. But ten years later, when they were designing the first Macintosh, it all came back to him. He designed it all into the Mac, which became the first computer with beautiful typography. The Mac would not have had multiple typefaces if he had never dropped in on that calligraphy class. If he had never dropped out, then he would not have dropped in on the calligraphy class. So, it was all linked. Of course, back then, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward to when he was in college. But, it was evident for him looking back ten years later. Remember, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Trust in your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let Jobs' down, and that's what made all the difference in his life.
His second story is about love and loss.
Love and Loss
He considers himself lucky because he found what he loved to do early in life. Did you know that Apple was created in a garage by two friends? Well, yes, Steve Jobs reminisces about the old days when he and his friend Steven Wozniak started Apple. He was only twenty at the time. It was just the two of them in the garage, but they worked hard, and in ten years, it grew into a two-billion-dollar company with over 4,000 employees.
But that was not all. There were obstacles along the way, as Jobs got fired from Apple when he was around thirty, around the same time as the Macintosh was released. Now, I know you're wondering how he got fired from a company he started. Well, he explains that as Apple got bigger and grew, they decided to hire someone who would help him in running the company. Things were going great at first because he thought the person was very talented; however, at some point, their visions about the future of the company changed, and unfortunately, the board of directors sided with the other man; as you guys can imagine, this left Jobs' devastated as he was publicly fired at 30. What was once the priority of his life was now gone.
He opens up about feeling like a public failure and not knowing what to do about his life for a few months. He felt like he let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs. But he slowly began to come back, and he realized he loved what he did. He was rejected, but he was still in love, so he decided to start over.
You would be surprised, but Jobs actually considers getting fired from Apple as the best thing that has happened to him. Why? He answers that it freed him to enter one of the most creative periods of his life.
After five years, he started the NeXt company and Pixar. During this time, he fell in love with a woman who soon became his wife. Pixar became known for creating the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, which is now known as the most successful animation studio in the world. After that, an ironic twist happened as Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs returned to Apple, and he had a wonderful family by his side.
He believes none of these successes would have happened to him if he hadn't been fired from Apple. He calls it the "awful-tasting medicine that the patient needed." He encourages you not to lose faith when life throws bricks at your head. He also emphasizes that you have to find what you love to do because that's what will help you keep going. In order to do great work, you must love what you do. It's that simple. If you have yet to find what you love, then don't settle! Keep on looking. When you find it, you will know with your heart. And once you find it, it will only get better as the years roll on.
His third and last story is about death.
Death
For the past 33 years, he had been living by the quote, " 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 to that question was no for a few days in a row, he knew he needed to change something. Remembering that he would be dead soon was the most important tool he had encountered to help him make big choices in life. Because all things like external expectations, pride, fear of embarrassment, failure-they just fall away in the face of death. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid thinking you have something to lose. Just follow your heart.
Then, Jobs opens up about his cancer diagnosis. An early morning scan showed a tumor on his pancreas. The doctors told him that it was almost a type of cancer that was incurable and that he should not expect to live longer than three to six months. Doctors advised him to go home and get his affairs in order. In other words, prepare to die and say your goodbyes. He lived with that diagnosis for an entire day. Later that same evening he had a biopsy where they got a few cells from the tumor. He was sedated, but his wife, who was there, told him that the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a rare form of pancreatic cancer that was curable with surgery. He had the surgery, and everything was normal again.
Death is the destination we all share, but no one wants to die. No one has ever escaped it. It clears out the old to make way for the new. He tells the students right now the new is them, but someday not too long from now, they will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
He ends his speech by mentioning that time is limited, so we shouldn't waste it living someone else's life. At last, he encourages the students to stay hungry and stay foolish.
To sum up, after listening to this speech, it's impossible not to get inspired and motivated. Sometimes challenges push us back and make us want to give up, but it's essential to love what you do and have faith in yourself to reach your goals. Even the obstacles are meant to push you to become better. Follow your heart and intuition. Everything else is secondary.
