Thank you.

I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the
finest 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. after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18
months or so before I really quit. So why'd 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 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 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 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 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
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, 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 love to do early in life. Waz 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 4,000 employees. We'd
just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd 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.
And 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'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 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. 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 Loreen 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.

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 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
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 doctor's 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 everything is buttoned up
so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I live
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 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 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. 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 Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he
brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, 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, 35 years before Google
came along. It was idealistic, 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. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you
all very much.

I'm not impressed by physical appearance anymore. I want someone who will inspire me
and motivate me as I tackle my pathway towards becoming the better version of myself.
I want someone with a kind of intelligence that will educate me on the topics I don't know
about — stirring my creativity and thoughts by means of expanding my views on certain
things.
I want someone who can make me smile by means of humorous jokes, memes or witty
lines that can change your negative mood into a positive one at a sudden pace.
I want someone who is not afraid to voice out her emotions, opinions and perspective
- someone who is not afraid to share her past, her vulnerable side, the complicated and
isolated part of herself without using sugarcoated lies and pretentious words to conceal
the reality of her soul.
I want someone who can envision her future and dreams and what her plans are to
achieve the life she wants.
Darling, beauty fades, sexy bodies and flawless skin don't last for ageing will somehow
play its role someday.
But to have someone who embraces the reality of your mind and soul and will make you
realise that true love exists is a different kind of intimacy.