Stay hungry, Stay foolish

It's an honor to be here with you today and stand before you at your commencement ceremony at one of the world's best universities. I never graduated from college, and to be honest, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. Nothing extraordinary, just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots...

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then I stayed around for another year and a half before I really left. So why did I drop out? It all started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate who 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. But 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 found out later that my adoptive mother had never graduated from college and that my adoptive 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 her that I would someday go to college. This is how my life began...

17 years later, I went to college, but the college was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings went into my tuition. After 6 months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and college wasn't helping me figure it out. I was spending all of my parents' life savings. So I decided to drop out and trust that everything would work out. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The moment I dropped out, I no longer had to take the required classes that didn't interest me and could start taking the ones that seemed much more interesting and valuable. But it wasn't that romantically simple...

Since I no longer had a dorm room, I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposit to buy food. Every Sunday, I walked 7 miles (11 km) across town to get one good hot meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. Many things I stumbled upon by following my curiosity and intuition later proved to be invaluable. Let me give you an example...

At that time, Reed College offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the entire campus, all the posters and official notices were beautifully handwritten with calligraphy. I signed up for the course to learn this type of writing. I learned about Serif and San Serif typefaces, the varying amounts of space between different letter combinations, and everything else that makes typography truly great. It was beautiful, historical, and artistically subtle in a way that science couldn't capture, and I found it fascinating. It seemed hopeless and unlikely that I would ever find any real use for this in my life, but 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, this knowledge came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac, which was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I hadn't taken that class and completed that course, perhaps there would never have been proportionately spaced typefaces. If I hadn't taken that class, the Mac might never have had proportional typefaces, and since Windows copied the Mac, perhaps personal computers would never have had any of this. If I hadn't dropped out, I never would have taken that class, and personal computers would not have the wonderful typographic capabilities we know today.

Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots in such a way when I was in college, but the connection is very clear looking back 10 years later. Again. you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, you have to believe in something. God, fate, life, karma, or whatever, but you have to believe that the dots will connect. Listen to your heart and follow the path your heart dictates, even if it deviates from the well-trodden path. This is the real difference.

My second story is about love and loss...

I was lucky because I found what I wanted to do early in life. Wozniak and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard for years, and in 10 years, Apple grew from a two-man startup in a garage into a $2 billion company (which became $382 billion in 2011!!!) with 4,000 employees. After 9 years, we released our most excellent product, the Macintosh, and then I turned 30. And then I got fired.

But how can you get fired from a company you started? As Apple grew, we hired someone I thought was very talented to run the company with me. For the first year, things went well, but then our visions for the future diverged significantly, and in the end, we had a falling out. When that happened, the Board of Directors sided with him, so at 30, I was out. Everything I had focused on my entire life was gone, and this feeling was terribly disheartening. For a few months, I had no idea what to do. I felt like I had let the previous generation destroy everything we had built because I let go of control, and they tricked me. Later, I met David Packard (Hewlett Packard) and Bob Noyce (Intel), and I tried to apologize to them. I made a huge mistake and would have gladly left Silicon Valley, but then the thought slowly crystallized in my mind that I still loved what I was doing. Apple had rejected me, but I was still in love with my work, so I decided to start over.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was bitter medicine, but I think the patient – me – needed it. Life sometimes hits you with a brick, but never lose faith in yourself. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was my love for what I did. You have to find what you love, and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers and your friends. Your work will 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. Your heart will know when you find it, and like any great relationship, it will get 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 this: "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 30 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 an incurable type of cancer, 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. This is doctor's code for "prepare to die." It means to try to tell your children 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." It was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was kind of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, brimming with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues, and then, when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. This was in 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 adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message.

I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay hungry, stay foolish...