Three Stories
from My Life

Steve Jobs — CEO of Apple & Pixar

“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.”

What He Talked AboutJump to any story

Connecting the dots — dropping out, calligraphy, and the Mac’s typefaces.
Love and loss — being fired from the company he built, and starting over.
Death — a cancer diagnosis, and why remembering death clears the way.

Connecting the DotsTrust that the dots will join up

The dropout

He dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, then hung around for another 18 months or so before actually leaving.
He was born to a young, unmarried graduate student who decided to put him up for adoption — and insisted he be adopted by college graduates.
A lawyer and his wife were lined up. At the last minute they decided they wanted a girl, so his parents — who were on the waiting list — got a midnight call: “We have an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?”
His biological mother later found out his adoptive mother had never graduated from college and his father had never finished high school, and refused to sign the final adoption papers. She relented a few months later, after his parents promised he would go to college.

Seventeen years later

He went to college — and naively chose one as expensive as Stanford, spending everything his working-class parents had saved their whole lives.
After six months he couldn’t see the value in it. He had no idea what he wanted to do, and no idea how college would help him figure it out — while his parents’ life savings were already spent.
So he dropped out and trusted it would work out. It was scary and beautiful at the same time, and looking back it was one of the best decisions he ever made.
Dropping out let him stop taking the required classes he didn’t care about and drop into the ones that interested him.
It was not romantic: no dorm room, sleeping on the floor in friends’ rooms, returning Coke bottles for 5-cent deposits to buy food, and a seven-mile walk across town every Sunday night for one good meal at the Hare Krishna temple.

The calligraphy class

Reed offered what was probably the best calligraphy instruction in the country — beautiful lettering everywhere on campus, on every poster, on every drawer.
Because he had dropped out and wasn’t taking the normal classes, he decided to take a calligraphy class.
He learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between letter combinations, and about what makes great typography great — beautiful, historical, artistic, and precise in a way science can’t capture.
None of it had any hope of practical application in his life. But ten years later, when Apple was designing the first Macintosh, it all came back.
The Mac was the first computer with beautiful typography. Had he never dropped in on that single course, the Mac would have had no multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts — and since Windows copied the Mac, personal computers might have had none at all.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Believing the dots will connect gives you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.

Love and LossFind what you love — and don’t settle

The rise

He was lucky: he found what he loved to do early in life.
Woz and he started Apple in his parents’ garage when he was 20. They worked hard, and in ten years Apple grew from two people in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
They had just released the Macintosh — the best thing they had ever made — a year earlier, and he had just turned 30.

20Age when Apple began

10 yrsTo a $2 billion company

4,000+Employees

The fall

Then he got fired. How do you get fired from a company you started?
As Apple grew, he hired someone he believed was talented to run the company with him. For about a year things went well — then their visions of the future began to diverge and they finally fell out.
When that happened, the board of directors sided with the other man. At 30 years old, he was out — and very publicly out.
What had been the focus of his entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. For months he didn’t know what to do.
He felt he had let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs — that he had dropped the baton as it was being passed to him.
He met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. He was a very public failure, and even thought about running away.

The restart

But something slowly began to dawn on him: he still loved what he did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. He had been rejected, but he was still in love.
So he decided to start over.
He didn’t see it then, but being fired from Apple turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to him.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed him to enter one of the most creative periods of his life.
During the next five years he started a company named NeXT, another named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who became his wife, Laurene.
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 he returned to Apple — and the technology developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. Laurene and he have a wonderful family together.

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

What kept him going was that he loved what he did. You’ve got to find what you love — and that is as true for your work as it is for the people you love. 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. 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.

DeathThe best tool for the big decisions

The morning question

At 17 he read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
It made a deep impression. For the past 33 years he looked in the mirror every morning and asked himself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
Whenever the answer was “no” for too many days in a row, he knew he needed to change something.
Remembering that he would be dead soon was the most important tool he ever encountered for making the big choices in life.
Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — falls away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

The diagnosis

About a year before the speech, he was diagnosed with cancer. A scan at 7:30 in the morning clearly showed a tumor on his pancreas.
He didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told him it was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that he should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
His doctor advised him to go home and get his affairs in order — doctor code for “prepare to die.”
That meant saying everything to his children that he thought he had ten more years to tell them, in just a few months. It meant making sure everything was laid out for his family, so it would be as easy as possible for them. It meant saying goodbye.
He lived with that diagnosis all day. That evening he had a biopsy, taking cells from the tumor.
He was sedated, but his wife, who was there, told him that when the doctors looked at the cells under the microscope they started crying — because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
He had the surgery and was fine. It was the closest he had come to facing death, and he hoped it would stay that way for a few more decades.

“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.”

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.

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.

One Last Catalog

When he was young there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, created by Stewart Brand not far from there in Menlo Park, brought to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing — it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras.

It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues, and when it had run its course they put out a final issue.

It was the mid-1970s, and he was their age. On the back cover of that 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.

And he had always wished that for himself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, he wished it for you.

Take It With You

Trust the dots. You can’t connect them looking forward — only backwards. Trust in something, and let that give you the confidence to follow your heart.
Find what you love. Work will fill a large part of your life. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking — don’t settle.
Ask the morning question. “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” If it’s “no” too many days in a row, change something.
Guard your inner voice. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown it out, and don’t live someone else’s life with the time you have.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Steve Jobs at Stanford — Three Stories