It is an honor to be here today as you graduate from one of the best schools in the world. I've never graduated from college, and to be honest, this is the closest I've come to graduating from college.
Today, I will only tell three stories. I won’t talk about big principles, just three stories.
The first story is about how the dots in life connect together.
I took a leave of absence from Reed College after six months. Before I dropped out of school, I had been out of school for a total of eighteen months. So, why did I take a break from school?
This starts before I was born.
My birth mother was a graduate student at the time and a young, unmarried mother, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt strongly that I should be adopted by someone with a college degree, so when I was born, she prepared for me to be adopted by a lawyer couple. But the couple backed out at the last minute and wanted to adopt the girl. So a couple on the waiting list, my adoptive parents, got a call in the middle of the night asking them, "There's a boy who was born unexpectedly, do you want to adopt him?" and their answer was, "Of course I will." ". Later, my biological mother discovered that my current mother had never graduated from college, and my current father had never even graduated from high school. She refused to put the final signature on the adoption papers. It wasn’t until a few months later, when my adoptive parents promised that I would attend college, that she relented.
Seventeen years later, I went to college. But I ignorantly chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and my working-class parents spent all their savings on my tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in reading this book. At that time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn’t know how studying in college would help me. I only knew that I had spent all my parents’ savings in order to study in this school, so I decided to drop out of school and believe that the ship would arrive. The bridge head is naturally straight.
This decision seemed terrible at the time, but looking back now, it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
When I dropped out of school, I no longer had to take required classes that didn't interest me, and spent my time taking classes that did.
This is not romantic at all. I didn’t have a dormitory, so I slept on the floor at friends’ houses, bought food with the 5 cent rebate from recycled Coke cans, and walked seven miles around half the town to the Hindu Hare Krishna every Sunday night. A good meal at the temple, I like the good food at the Hare Krishna temple.
Just following my curiosity and intuition, most of the things I have been involved in have turned out to be priceless experiences. (And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on) . For example.
At that time, Reed College had probably the best writing education in the country. There are beautiful handwritings on every poster on campus and on every drawer label. Because I was on leave from school, I didn't have to follow the normal course selection procedures, so I took a calligraphy class. I learned about serif and sanserif fonts, about changing the spacing between different letter combinations, and about the greatness of movable type printing. There is a beauty, a sense of history and artistry to writing that science cannot capture, and I find that fascinating.
I never expected that learning these things would play any practical role in my life, but ten years later, when I was designing the first Macintosh, I remembered what I had learned at that time, so I designed all these things. Enter the Macintosh, the first computer that could print beautiful things.
If I hadn't been so immersed in a class like that, the Mac might not have had multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts. And because Windows copied the way of using Macintosh, if I had not dropped out of school and taken that writing class, probably all personal computers would not have these things, and they would not be able to print the beautiful text we see now. The words are coming. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots in advance when I was still in college, but looking back ten years later, it all seems very clear.
I say it again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them in retrospect. them looking backwards). So you have to believe that what you experience now will be more or less connected in the future. You have to trust something, whether it's intuition, fate, life, or karma. This approach has never let me down, and my life has been completely different because of it.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky - I discovered what I loved doing at a young age. When I was twenty, Steve Wozniak and I started Apple Computer in my parents' garage. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just two guys in a garage into a company with over 4,000 employees and a $2 billion company, launching our greatest work the year before that. The Macintosh, I was just turning 30, and I got laid off.
How did I get fired from the company I founded?
Well, as Apple Computer grew, I brought in a guy who I thought was very talented at running the company, and he did a really good job for the first few years. But we had different visions for the future, and we had to part ways in the end. The board of directors sided with him and publicly fired me when I was 30 years old. I lost the focus of my entire life and my life was destroyed.
For a few months, I didn’t know what to do. I felt that I had let down my predecessors in the business world - that I had dropped the baton that they had handed me. I met with David Packard, who founded HP, and Bob Noyce, who founded Intel, and told them I was sorry for screwing up. I became a failure in the public eye, and I even wanted to leave Silicon Valley.
But gradually, I discovered that I still loved the things I did, and what I experienced in Apple Computers did not change what I loved to do at all. Even though I was rejected, I still loved doing those things, so I decided to start over.
I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back now, getting fired from Apple Computer was the best thing that ever happened to me. The heaviness of success was replaced by the ease of starting over, with everything uncertain, freeing me to enter the most creative years of my life.
In the next five years, I started a company called NeXT, another company called Pixar, and fell in love with my future wife (Laurene). Pixar went on to create the world's first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. Then, Apple Computer bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT became a core part of Apple Computer's subsequent resurgence.
I also have a wonderful family.
I'm pretty sure that if Apple Computer hadn't fired me, none of this would have happened. This medicine is very bitter, but I think Apple's patient needs this medicine. Sometimes life hits you over 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 all these years.
You have to find what you love most, and this is true at work and in your life partner.
Your work will take up 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. work is to love what you do).
If you haven't found these things yet, keep looking and don't stop. Try your best and you know you will find it. And, like any great endeavor, things only get better with time. So, keep looking and don’t stop until you find it.
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)"
This has had a profound impact on me. For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today was the last day of this life, what would I do today?" Every time I continue to When I get the answer "nothing to do" for many days, I know I have to change something.
Reminding myself that I am going to die is the most important thing I have ever done when faced with the biggest decisions in my life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all fame, all fear of embarrassment or failure - disappears in the face of death, and only the most real and important things remain. 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). Reminding yourself that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid falling into the trap of fear of loss. If you don't bring it in life, you won't take it with you in death. There's no reason why you can't do as you please.
A year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a tomography scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it was clear that there was a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctor told me that it was almost certainly an incurable disease and I was not expected to live for three to six months. The doctor suggested that I go home and spend time with my loved ones. This is standard advice given to dying patients. That means you have to try to say in a few months what you want to say to your children for the next ten years. That means you have to get everything done so that your family can be as relaxed as possible. That means you have to say goodbye to someone.
I thought about the diagnosis all day, and that night I did a biopsy, inserted an endoscope from the throat, passed through the stomach into the intestines, inserted the probe into the pancreas, and took out some tumor cells. I was sedated and unconscious, but my wife was present. She later told me that when the doctors looked at the cells under a microscope, they all cried because it was a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that could be cured with surgery. So I had surgery and recovered.
This was the closest I've ever been to death, and I hope it will continue to be the closest I've ever been for decades to come. After experiencing this, I can tell you this with greater certainty than I could before when death was purely imaginary:
No one wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven also want to go to heaven alive.
But death is our common destination and no one can escape it. This is doomed, because death is probably the best invention in life, the medium for the transition of life, sending away the old and clearing the way for the new generation. Now you are the new generation, but in the near future, you will gradually grow old and be sent off the stage of life. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be limited by dogma - blindly following dogma is living by the results of other people's thinking. Don't let other people's opinions drown out your inner voice. Most importantly, 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 magazine called "Whole Earth Catalog", which was a classic reading material for us back then. It was published by Stewart Brand, who lived in Menlo Park not far from here. He ran the magazine very poetically. This was the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, and everything was produced with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. The magazine's content was a bit like Google on paper, 35 years before Google existed: it was idealistic, full of new gadgets and great insights.
Stewart and his team published several issues of "Whole Earth Catalog" and then, naturally, the issue was discontinued. It was the mid-1970s, and I was the age you are now. On the back cover of the discontinued issue, there was a picture of an early morning country road, the kind you'd take on your hitchhiking adventures.
There were small words printed under the photo: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.
That was their handwritten farewell message, and I always say that to myself. As you graduate and start a new life, I wish you the best.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.
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