Name: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech ASL
Uploaded: 2013-04-24T17:21:33.000Z
Duration: 14 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

Thank you 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.

The first story is about connecting the dots. 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? 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.

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

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Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech ASL

entire

intuition

failure

issue