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On the morning of June 16, 2005, Steve woke up with butterflies in his stomach. In fact, says Laurene, “I’d almost never seen him more nervous.”
Steve was a natural performer who elevated business presentations to something close to high art. But what made him fidgety this day was the prospect of addressing the Stanford University graduating class of 2005. University president John Hennessy had broached the idea several months earlier, and after taking just a little time to think it over, Steve had said yes. He was offered speaking engagements constantly, and he always said no. In fact, he was asked to do so many commencement addresses that it became a running joke with Laurene and other friends who had college or graduate degrees: Steve said he’d accept one just to make an end run around them and get his PhD in a day, versus the years and years it had taken them. But in the end, saying no was simply a question of return on investment—conferences and public speaking seemed to offer a meager payoff compared to other things, like a dazzling MacWorld presentation, working on a great product, or being around his family. “If you look closely at how he spent his time,” says Tim Cook, “you’ll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attend. He wanted to be home for dinner.”
Stanford was different, even though speaking there would not turn Steve into Dr. Jobs—the school did not offer honorary degrees. For starters, he wouldn’t have to travel or miss dinner, since it was possible for him to drive from his house to the university in just seven minutes. More important, the university was deeply tied into the Silicon Valley tech community in a way he admired. Its education was first-rate and the professors he’d met through the years, like Jim Collins, were top caliber. Despite being a dropout, he always enjoyed spending time around smart college students. “He was only going to do one commencement speech,” says Laurene, “and if it was going to be anywhere it was going to be at Stanford.”
Getting around to writing the speech proved to be something of a bother. Steve had talked to a few friends about what to say, and he had even asked the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for some thoughts. But nothing came of all that, so finally he decided to write it himself. He wrote up a draft one night, and then started bouncing ideas off Laurene, Tim Cook, and a couple of others. “He really wanted to get it right,” says Laurene. “He wanted it to say something he really cared about.” The language changed slightly, but its structure, which summed up his essential values in three vignettes, remained the same. In the days before the event he would recite it while walking around the house, from the bedroom upstairs to the kitchen below, the kids watching their dad spring past them in the same kind of trance he’d sometimes enter in the days before MacWorld or Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Several times he read it to the whole family at dinner.
That Sunday morning, as the family got ready to leave for Stanford Stadium, Steve spent some time looking for his keys to the SUV, which he couldn’t find anywhere, but then he decided he didn’t want to drive anyway—he’d use the short ride to rehearse once more. By the time the family piled into the SUV, they were late. Laurene drove as Steve tweaked the text yet again. Steve was sitting shotgun, with Erin, Eve, and Reed piled into the backseat. As they made their way toward the campus, Steve and Laurene fumbled through their pockets and Laurene’s handbag, looking for the VIP parking pass they’d been sent. They couldn’t find it anywhere.
As they neared Stanford, it became apparent that they should have built in more time—twenty-three thousand people were descending on the stadium that morning. The stadium is usually easy to get to, since it sits just off El Camino Real, but many roads were blocked off to accommodate the heavy pedestrian traffic of graduates and their families. When they finally got into the eucalyptus grove on the outskirts of the campus that doubled as a parking lot for the stadium, Laurene had to navigate around one roadblock after another. Steve was getting tense—he thought he might miss the only graduation speech he’d ever agreed to give.
Finally the family arrived at what seemed to be the last roadblock before the stadium. A policewoman standing by the sawhorse waved at Laurene to stop. She walked slowly over to the driver’s side of the car.
“You can’t go this way, ma’am,” she said. “There’s no parking here. You’ll have to go back to Paly [Palo Alto High School], across El Camino. That’s where the overflow lot is.”
“No, no, no,” Laurene said. “We have a parking pass. We just lost it.”
The policewoman stared at her.
“You don’t understand,” Laurene explained. “I have the commencement speaker here. He’s right here in the car. Really!”
The officer dipped her head and looked in through Laurene’s window. She saw the three kids in the back, the elegant blond driver, and a man in the shotgun seat wearing tattered jeans, Birkenstocks, and an old black T-shirt. He was fiddling with a few pieces of paper in his lap as he looked up at her through his rimless glasses. The officer stepped back and folded her arms.
“Really?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Which one?”
Everyone in the car broke out laughing. “Really,” said Steve, raising his hand. “It’s me.”
WHEN THEY FINALLY reached the stadium, Steve, who had donned a cap and gown, headed for the dais with President Hennessy, while Laurene and the kids accompanied his daughters to a luxury booth above the football field. The scene was the typical Stanford mix of solemnity and frivolity. Some students marched around dressed in wigs and Speedos, participating in what’s known as the “wacky walk,” while others simply sported the regular graduation gowns. A handful dressed up as iPods. Hennessy spent a few minutes introducing Steve. He spoke of Steve as a college dropout who, ironically, could serve as a model of the kind of broad thinking needed to change the world for the better. The students were thrilled with Hennessy’s choice of commencement speaker. Steve seemed so much more accessible than the stuffed shirts who typically address graduating classes. After he tucked away his bottled water in a shelf under the speaker’s podium, Steve launched into the fifteen-minute speech that would become the most-quoted commencement address of all time:
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 six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 seventeen years later I did go to college. But I naïvely 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 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 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 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 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 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 twenty. We worked hard, and in ten 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 had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty. 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 thirty 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 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, 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 seventeen, 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 thirty-three 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 seven thirty 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 expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten 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, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. 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 sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was 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 so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. 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 very much.
From his earliest days, Steve had always been able to spin a tale. But nothing he ever said before resonated this way. The speech has been viewed at least 35 million times on YouTube. It didn’t go viral, in the way of a Web phenomenon of 2015—social networks weren’t as developed or extensive a decade ago. But it gradually became recognized as something truly exceptional, of great meaning to a world of people beyond the Stanford Stadium as well. Its popularity surprised him. “None of us expected it to take off like that,” says Katie Cotton, who headed up communications and PR for Apple at the time.
It was not a speech that would have resonated or gotten the same attention a few years earlier. But by the summer of 2005, Apple was back, and Steve’s reputation along with it. Revenues and profits were up, and the stock too was beginning to move in the right direction. All thoughts of the dark days, all memories of Spindler and Sculley and Amelio had been banished, at least for the public—Steve himself always kept those times in the back of his mind, as a reminder of what could happen if Apple didn’t stay sharp. Much of the public found something deeply admirable about what he had accomplished. Steve was no longer a wunderkind and he had put the has-been label to rest. Now he seemed to be a comeback hero, defying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage that “there are no second acts in American life.” The question was no longer whether Apple would survive; the question was, What would Apple do next? Indeed, the cover story I had written for Fortune a few weeks before the speech was titled “How Big Can Apple Get?”
For Jim Collins, Apple’s comeback is the starting point for considering the nature Steve’s greatness as a businessman. “We all get crushed or decked or knocked down. Everyone does. Sometimes you may not even see that it’s happened, but it happens to everyone,” says Collins, who besides writing several bestsellers in the last ten years has also turned himself into a world-class rock climber. “Whenever I find myself tired, whenever I’m thinking about whether I want to launch into another creative project, I always think of Steve in that period when he was in trouble. I’ve always drawn sustenance from that. That’s a touchstone for me, that willingness not to capitulate.”
Collins has specialized in the study of what makes great companies tick, and what marks the people who lead them. He sees something unique in Steve’s unorthodox business education. “I used to call him the Beethoven of business,” he says, “but that’s more true of when he was young. When Steve was twenty-two, you could consider him a genius with a thousand helpers. But he grew way beyond that. He’s not a success story, but a growth story. It’s truly remarkable to go from being a great artist to being a great company builder.”
After the scattered political and emotional frenzy of his first decade at Apple, and after his failure to deliver what he promised at NeXT, it was hard to imagine that Steve could ever be considered a great business leader. But by the summer of 2005, he had begun to seem just that. Clearly, Apple would have simply disappeared without him. Luck had played a big role in getting Steve back to Apple, but, says Collins, echoing Ed Catmull, “What separates people is the return on luck, what you do with it when you get it. What matters is how you play the hand you’re dealt.” He continues, “You don’t leave the game, until it’s not your choice. Steve Jobs had great luck at arriving at the birth of an industry. Then he had bad luck in getting booted out. But Steve played whatever hand he was dealt to the best of his ability. Sometimes you create the hand, by giving yourself challenges that will make you stronger, where you don’t even know what’s next. That’s the beauty of the story. Steve’s almost like the Tom Hanks character in Castaway—just keep breathing because you don’t know what the tide will bring in tomorrow.”
“The narrative that was created around Steve 1.0 has dominated,” says Collins. “That’s partly because the story of a man who matured slowly into a seasoned leader is less interesting. Learning how to have disposable cash flow, and how to pick the right people, and growing, and rounding off the sharp edges, and not merely acting strange—that’s not as interesting! But all that personality stuff is just the packaging, the window dressing. What’s the truth of your ambition? Do you have the humility to continually grow, to learn from your failures and get back up? Are you utterly relentless for your cause, ferocious for your cause? Can you channel your intensity and intelligence and energy and talents and gifts and ideas outward into something that is bigger and more impactful than you are? That’s what great leadership is about.”
Part of what makes the Stanford speech so powerful is that it elucidates the very personal, and hard-earned, values Steve brought to his later leadership of Apple. Each of its three stories contains guidance that Steve could only really understand as a mature man. He was always glib, and he perhaps could have said these things as a younger man. But he wouldn’t have really known what they meant.
You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. The young Steve would have had none of this statement from the story about dropping out of Reed College. In the decade after founding Apple, Steve was hell-bent on shaping the future to his vision. He believed he could connect the dots as he moved forward. Time and again, his engineers found themselves hamstrung trying to fit their work into his sometimes brilliant, sometimes misguided, specifications. That first time around at Apple, and again at NeXT, Steve had been convinced he could do just about everything better than the people working around him. But when he returned to Apple, he really did “have to trust that the dots [would] somehow connect.” Again and again during his second act, the specifics of Apple’s next big things arose from unlikely sources. The iMac was concocted from the design of the eMate, a product that Steve killed. The iPod and iTunes were the direct result of Steve’s misguided interest in movie-editing software. Now Apple was developing a phone because five disparate teams knew that they had Steve’s backing to explore widely, and their work had led him to decide against pursuing the product he really wanted to build, a tablet. Steve had grown comfortable with only seeing the connections between the dots after the fact. Maturity, and the extraordinary talents of the team he had built, made that possible.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.… The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.… 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. Steve discovered what he loved to do early in his life. But what gave these words—from the second story in the speech, the section about love and loss—such power in 2005 was the fact that the love he had for his work had survived so much, and resulted in so much. It took lots and lots of time—all those years of struggling at NeXT, of reconfiguring Pixar, of stabilizing Apple—for things to get “better and better.” Now he could speak with the confidence of someone who had worked on relationships—with Laurene, with the executive team at Apple, and even with his first daughter, Lisa. Steve’s struggles, and everything that he had learned as a result, were essential to Apple’s ability to again and again create products that people loved. No other huge company, save Disney perhaps, creates products that engender such emotional responses, even from otherwise skeptical journalists. After one product announcement, the New York Times ran a wrap-up story with the headline “The magic in Apple’s devices? The heart”—and this was three years after Steve’s death. The company, like its boss, had many faults. But it worked with a sense of mission that was different from other companies in its industry.
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Without the proof of Apple’s success, these words from the speech’s final chapter could be misread as the kind of callow cheerleading intoned by high school valedictorians. But what gives them strength and power is that they come from someone who had proved their value in a corporate setting. Just as Steve thoroughly deviated from the norm, Apple deviated from the norm of its industry, and in many ways from all of corporate America. Steve had learned how to modulate the potential solipsism of “follow your heart.” Early in his career, “intuition” had meant a shuttered confidence in the inventions of his own brain. There was a stubborn refusal to consider the thoughts of others. By 2005, intuition had come to mean a sense of what to do that grew out of entertaining a world of possibilities. He was confident enough now to listen to his team as well as his own thoughts, and to acknowledge the nature of the world around him—as he had when learning about the movie industry at Pixar, or in evaluating the openings for Apple upon his return to the company—as he moved toward a course of action. Apple didn’t steer toward the iPhone as a result of focus groups or market research. It headed that way because of intuition, but an intuition that was deeper and richer than the selfish preferences of the young man who had founded Apple.
WHEN I FIRST read the speech online, I remembered an interview I’d conducted with Steve in 1998. We had been talking about the trajectory of his career when, in a rambling aside not unlike the road on the back cover of the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, Steve told me about the impact that the Catalog had had upon him. “I think back to it when I am trying to remind myself of what to do, of what’s the right thing to do.” A few weeks after that interview had been published in Fortune, I received an envelope in the mail. It was from Stewart Brand, and it contained a rare copy of that final issue. “Please give this to Steve next time you see him,” Stewart asked. When I did, a week or two later, Steve was thrilled. He’d remembered the issue for all those years, but had never had the time to locate a copy for himself.
The end of the Stanford speech focuses on the Catalog’s back-cover motto, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” but my favorite line about the catalog in Steve’s speech is when he describes it as “idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” This is, in fact, a lovely description of Steve’s companies at their best. He was an empathetic man who wanted these graduates to head off on foolish, hungry pursuits, and who wanted to give them neat tools and great notions as they began their winding journey. Like Jim Collins, I had gotten close enough to Steve to see beyond his harshness and the occasional outright rudeness to the idealist within. Sometimes it was hard to convey this idealism to others, given Steve’s intensity and unpredictably sharp elbows. The Stanford commencement speech gave the world a glimpse of that genuine idealism.
