raj_rathee
June 22nd, 2005, 07:37 AM
Steve Jobs speech at Stanford...Pretty nice. Had to break it up
in two parts to post since exceeded max length for one post...
> Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
>
> 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
>
> This is the text of the Commencement address by
> Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar
> Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
>
> 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 5ยข 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, its 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
> retuned 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.
>
in two parts to post since exceeded max length for one post...
> Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
>
> 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
>
> This is the text of the Commencement address by
> Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar
> Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
>
> 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 5ยข 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, its 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
> retuned 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.
>