Steve Jobs - Steve Jobs - Stanford Commencement Address | Текст песни

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• Steve Jobs
• Steve Jobs - Stanford Commencement Address

Thank you.


I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one ofthe finest universities in the world.
Truth be told, I never graduated fromcollege, 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 ReedCollege after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-infor another 18 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, unwedgraduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
She feltvery strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, soeverything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and hiswife — except that when I popped out they decided at the last minutethat they really wanted a girl.


So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of thenight asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy;
do you want him?"
They said, "Of course."
My biological mother found out later that mymother had never graduated from college and that my father had nevergraduated from high school.
She refused to sign the final adoptionpapers.
She only relented a few months later when my parentspromised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life.


And 17 years later I did go to college.
But I naively chose a college thatwas almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-classparents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After sixmonths, I couldn't see the value in it.
I had no idea what I wanted to dowith 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 theirentire life.


So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.
It waspretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisionsI ever made.
The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the requiredclasses that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones thatlooked far more interesting.


It wasn't all romantic.
I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor infriends' rooms.
I returned coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buyfood with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sundaynight 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 intuitionturned out to be priceless later on.
Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphyinstruction in the country.
Throughout the campus every poster, everylabel on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
Because I haddropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided totake a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
I learned about serif andsan serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space betweendifferent letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can'tcapture, and I found it fascinating.


None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
Butten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, itall came back to me.
And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the firstcomputer 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 personalcomputer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would havenever dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal computersmight not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it wasimpossible 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 connectthem looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots willsomehow connect in your future.
You have to trust in something — yourgut, destiny, life, karma, whatever — because believing that the dots willconnect 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 thedifference.


My second story is about love and loss.


I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life.
Woz¹ and I startedApple in my parents' garage when I was 20.
We worked hard, and in 10years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a twobillion dollar company with over 4000 employees.
We'd just released ourfinest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned30.


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 talentedto run the company with me, and for the first year or so things wentwell.
But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventuallywe had a falling out.
When we did, our Board of Directors sided withhim.
And so at 30, I was out.
And very publicly out.
What had been thefocus 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 theprevious generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped thebaton as it was being passed to me.
I met with David Packard and BobNoyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.
I was a verypublic 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.
Theturn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
I had beenrejected, 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 wasthe best thing that could have ever happened to me.
The heaviness ofbeing successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginneragain, less sure about everything.
It freed me to enter one of the mostcreative periods of my life.


During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, anothercompany named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman whowould become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the world's firstcomputer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the mostsuccessful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events,Apple bought NeXT, and I retuned to Apple, and the technology wedeveloped at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
AndLaurene and I have a wonderful family together.


I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been firedfrom Apple.
It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patientneeded it.
Sometime life — Sometimes life's going to hit you in the headwith a brick.
Don't lose faith.
I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I lovedwhat 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 tofill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to dowhat you believe is great work.
And the only way to do great work is tolove what you do.
If you haven't found it yet, keep looking — and don'tsettle.
As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.
Andlike any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years rollon.
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 eachday as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
It madean impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I've lookedin the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the lastday of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
Andwhenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know Ineed to change something.


Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've everencountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almosteverything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear ofembarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face ofdeath, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you aregoing to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you havesomething to lose.
You are already naked.
There is no reason not tofollow your heart.


About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7:30 in themorning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.
I didn't evenknow what a pancreas was.
The doctors told me this was almostcertainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect tolive no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to gohome and get my affairs in order, which is doct