One of the Greatest Speeches Ever Steve Jobs

today i want to tell you three stories

from my life

that’s it no big deal just three stories

[Music]

the first story is about connecting the

dots

[Music]

i dropped out of reed college after the

first six months but then stayed around

as a drop in for another 18 months or so

before i really quit

so why’d i drop out it started before i

was born

biological mother was a young unwed

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’ve got an unexpected baby boy

do you want him they said of course

my biological mother found out later

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 go to college this was the

start

in my life and seventeen 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 the money my

parents had saved their entire life

so i decided to drop out and trust that

it would all work out okay

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 far more 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 five

cent deposits to buy food with

and i would walk the seven miles across

town every sunday night

to get one good meal a week at the hari

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 sans 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 10 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 that 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 10 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

because believing that the dots will

connect 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 the difference

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 two billion dollar company with

over four thousand employees

we just released our finest creation the

macintosh a year earlier and i 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

and 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’d 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’d 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 likeness

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 world’s

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 and i returned to

apple and the technology we developed it

next is at the heart of apple’s current

renaissance

and laureen 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 sometime life sometimes life’s gonna

hit 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 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

and 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

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’ve 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

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

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’s 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’s 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

stay hungry stay foolish