universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological

mother found out later 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 go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen 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 of how college was going

to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 that calligraphy class and personals

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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down

the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the

well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

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 $2 billion company

with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year

earlier, and I'd 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, and 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'd 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 in 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology

we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 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 33 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 thing 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 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try

and 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 that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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's 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's 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, 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 Catalogue, which was

one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not

far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was

in the late Sixties, 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. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools

and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth

Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies

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 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.