This
is the "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" address delivered by
Steve Jobs in 2005 at Stanford University:
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 big deal. Just three stories.
I
dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.
So why did I drop out?
The
first story is about connecting the dots.
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 parents 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 5¢
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 returned 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.
Steve
says:
Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent.It clears out the old, to make room for the new.Right now the new is you.But you won't always be. Someday, you'll be the old.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. 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.
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 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 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 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 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 others' 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.
i got energy ...thanx Ram ki
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