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This program is brought to you by Stanford University

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Please visit us at stanford.edu

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(applause)

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Thank you

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I'm honoured to be with you today for your commencement from one of the

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finest universities in the world.

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Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And, this is the closest I've ever gotten

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to a college graduation.

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Today, I wanna tell you three stories from my life.

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That's it, no big deal, just three stories.

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The first story, is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of college after the first

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six months. But then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so

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before I really quitted. So why did I drop out?

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It started before I was born. My biological mother, was a young, unwed, graduate student,

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and she decided to put me up for adoption.

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She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graudates.

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So everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

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Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute, that they really wanted a girl.

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So my parents, who were on the waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking

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"We've got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him?"

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They said, "Of course".

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My biological mother found out later, that my mother had never graduated from college,

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and that my father had never graduated from high school.

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She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later,

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when my parents promised that I would go to college.

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This was the start, in my life.

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And seventeen years later, I did go to college; but I naively chose a college which was almost as

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expensive as Stanford, and all of my working class parents' savings were being spent

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on my college tuition.

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After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,

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and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

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And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.

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So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.

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It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

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(laughter)

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The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me,

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and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

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It wasn't all romantic.I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms.

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I returned Coke bottles for the five cents deposits to buy food with,

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and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good one meal

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a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.

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And much of what I stumbled into, by following my curiosity and intuition turned

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out to be priceless later on.

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Let me give you one example; Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best

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calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label

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on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed.

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Because I had dropped out, and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take

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a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif type faces,

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about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great

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typography great.

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It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle, in a way that science can't capture,

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and I found it fascinating.

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None of these had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

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But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

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And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

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If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the mac would've never had

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multiple type faces or proportionally spaced fonts.

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And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them

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(laughter and applause)

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If I had never dropped out, I would've never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal

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computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

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Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college,

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but it was very, very clear looking backwards, ten years later.

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Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.

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So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

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You have to trust in something, your God, destiny, life, karma, whatever,

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because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence

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to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will

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make all the diference.

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My second story, is about love, and loss.

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I was lucky, I found what I love to do, early in life. Woz and I started Apple in

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my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard, and in ten years,

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Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage, into a two billion dollar company

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with over four thousand employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh,

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a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty. And then I got fired.

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How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired

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someone whom I thought was very talented, to run the company with me.

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And for the first years or so, things went well, but then our visions of the future began to diverge.

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and eventually we ended up falling out. And when we did, our board of directors sided with him.

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And so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my

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entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

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I really didn't know what to do for a few months, I felt that I'd let the previous generation of

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entrepeneurs down, that I'd dropped the batton as it was being passed to me.

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I met with David Packard an Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

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I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the valley.

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But something slowly begun to dawn on me, I still loved what I did.

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The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected, but I

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was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it

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turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could've ever happened to me.

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The heavyness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,

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less sure about everything. It freed me to one of the most creative periods of my life.

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During the next five years, I started a company named Next, another company name Pixar,

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and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

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Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film; Toy Story,

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and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

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(applause)

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In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple and the technology

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we developed at Next is at heart of Apple's current renassaince. And Lereen and I