A dear friend passed me an e-mail that contained this speech in English, I tried a translation in Italian and here, I decided to create this post because it seems really a speech full of confidence in life and genuinely excited me:
Speech by Steve Jobs at Stanford (2005)
It is an honor to be here with you today at your commencement from one of the best universities in the world. I did not ever graduate. Indeed, to be honest, this is the experience closer to a degree that I've ever gotten. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it, nothing exceptional: only three stories.
The first story is about the join the dots.
left the Reed College after the first half, but continued to attend in for about 18 months before leaving permanently. Why do I let go?
all started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college and decided to give me up for adoption. He believed strongly that I should have been raised by people with degrees and made sure everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. When I came to send, however, they decided at the last minute that they preferred a girl. So my parents, who were on the waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night: "There is a baby boy, not provided. You want? ". They said: "Certainly." Only later, my biological mother found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never finished high school. He refused to sign the final adoption papers. He agreed to do months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
Seventeen years later I went to college. But I naively chose a college so expensive as Stanford, and all the savings of my parents ended up in tuition fees. After six months, I could not see any real opportunities. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and how college could help me understand. And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved from working a lifetime. So I decided to drop out and trust that everything would be solved in the best way. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The very moment I left college, I stopped to take courses that do not excite me, and begin to attend those that I found most interesting.
It was not all roses. I did not have a dorm room and I slept on the floor of the chambers of my friends. Back to store empty bottles of Coca Cola for five cents deposits to buy food. And every Sunday I walked for seven miles across town to finally have the only meal of the week Hara Krishna. I loved everything about this. And what I found by following my curiosity and my intuition turned out, only later to be priceless.
Let me give you an example. The Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best training calligraphy in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was hand written with beautiful handwriting. Because I had dropped the normal classes, I decided to take the calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif fonts, the difference between the spaces that separate the different letter combinations, about what makes great typography exceptional. It was beautiful, historical, artistic and refined in a way that science is unable to offer and I was totally fascinated.
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, everything I had learned came back to me useful. And it all into the Mac and 'was the first computer with beautiful typography one. If I had never dropped out of college and had never participated in that single course, the Mac would have never had different typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it is likely that there would be any personal computer with those capabilities. If I had not dropped out of college, I never went on that calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they now have. Clearly, when I was in college, it was impossible connect the dots looking forward. But it became very, very clear ten years later, when I could look back.
Again, you can not connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. You have to trust that, somehow, in the future, the dots will. You must believe in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This type of approach has never let me walk and has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and the loss
I was lucky: I found very quickly that I love to do. Woz and I founded Apple in the garage of my parents' house when I was 20 years. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had, by that company made both of us and a garage has turned into a two billion dollar company with over four thousand employees. The year before released our finest creation - the Macintosh - and I turned 30. The following year I got fired. How can you be fired from a company you yourself have created? Easy: When Apple became bigger, I took someone who I thought was very talented to guide the company with me and for the first year things went very well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we came to a fight. When we did, the Board of Directors sided with his party. So at 30 years, I was out. And in a rather blatant. What had been the focus of my adult life I was lost and devastated.
For some months I did not know quite what to do. I felt like I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs to me - as if I had dropped the baton was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. It was a very public failure, so that even thought about running away from Silicon Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me: I still loved what I did. What had happened at Apple had not changed a bit this love. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I did not realize it then, but being fired from Apple was the best thing that could happen. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me allowing me to enter one of the more creative in my life.
During the 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 produced the first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most famous 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 now the heart of the resurgence of Apple. And Laureen and I have a wonderful family.
'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I had not been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits us like a brick on his head. But do not lose faith. I am convinced that the only thing that kept me going was the love for what I did. You have to find one you love. And this applies to your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is 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 a good job is to love what you do. If you still have not found it yet, keep looking. Do not settle. With all my heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better looking with each passing year. So keep looking until you find it. Do not 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 were the last, surely once you are right. " Impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked: "If today were the last day of my life, I do what I am about to do today? ". And whenever the answer was "no" for too many days in a row, I realized that something had to be changed.
remind me that I will die soon is the most important tool I have ever found to make the big choices in my life. Because almost everything - all external expectations of eternity, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remember going to die is the best way to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that we 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. At half past seven in the morning I did the scan clearly showed a tumor in his pancreas. I did not know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me that it was a cancer that was incurable and almost certainly the kind I'd get it and not 3 months of life. I was told to go home and fix my business (which is the code to tell the doctors prepare to die). This means that I must prepare myself to tell my children, in a few months, everything I thought I had a life yet to say. It means that I must be sure everything was organized so that my family was as simple as possible. It means I had to say my goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. That evening I did a biopsy, in which you stuck an endoscope down the throat through the stomach to the intestines, put a needle into the pancreas and take some tumor cells. I was sedated, but my wife - who was there - the doctors told me that when they saw the cells under the microscope began to cry, because they had just discovered that I had a very rare form of cancer, curable with surgery. I underwent surgery and I'm fine.
That was the time I went more to death and I hope that, for decades, will be the last. Having lived, I can now say with a little 'more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.
Nobody wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven do not want to die to get there. But anyway, death is the destination we all have in common. No one has ever escaped it. And this is how it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of life. E 'agent change of life. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Now, the new is you, but someday not too far away gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's true.
Your time is limited, so do not waste it living someone else's life. Do not be trapped by dogma, with the results of other people's thinking. Do not let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition. They somehow already know what you really want. 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 Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and Stewart, she put in all his poetic touch. It was the late Sixties, before personal computers and electronic publishing, and the magazine was created entirely with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in print, 35 years before Google was invented: it was idealistic, overflowing with wonderful tools and concepts clear.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog and when they arrived at the end of their journey, a final issue. It was more or less half of the seventies and I was your age. On the last page of this issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind of street where you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were written these words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish, Be Foolish. It was their farewell message. 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.
Read speech-language original Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish .
