WEBVTT

00:00:07.669 --> 00:00:11.043
This program is brought to you by Stanford University

00:00:11.043 --> 00:00:15.207
Please visit us at stanford.edu

00:00:15.207 --> 00:00:21.499
(applause)

00:00:21.499 --> 00:00:27.254
Thank you

00:00:27.254 --> 00:00:30.540
I'm honoured to be with you today for your commencement from one of the

00:00:30.540 --> 00:00:36.003
finest universities in the world.

00:00:36.003 --> 00:00:43.968
Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And, this is the closest I've ever gotten

00:00:43.968 --> 00:00:47.769
to a college graduation.

00:00:47.769 --> 00:00:53.944
Today, I wanna tell you three stories from my life.

00:00:53.944 --> 00:00:56.639
That's it, no big deal, just three stories.

00:00:56.639 --> 00:01:02.200
The first story, is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of college after the first

00:01:02.200 --> 00:01:07.083
six months. But then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so

00:01:07.083 --> 00:01:12.537
before I really quitted. So why did I drop out?

00:01:12.537 --> 00:01:19.246
It started before I was born. My biological mother, was a young, unwed, graduate student,

00:01:19.246 --> 00:01:22.463
and she decided to put me up for adoption.

00:01:22.463 --> 00:01:27.041
She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graudates.

00:01:27.041 --> 00:01:32.166
So everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

00:01:32.166 --> 00:01:38.083
Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute, that they really wanted a girl.

00:01:38.083 --> 00:01:42.467
So my parents, who were on the waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking

00:01:42.467 --> 00:01:47.501
"We've got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him?"

00:01:47.501 --> 00:01:50.880
They said, "Of course".

00:01:50.880 --> 00:01:55.628
My biological mother found out later, that my mother had never graduated from college,

00:01:55.628 --> 00:01:59.074
and that my father had never graduated from high school.

00:01:59.074 --> 00:02:05.278
She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later,

00:02:05.278 --> 00:02:09.325
when my parents promised that I would go to college.

00:02:09.325 --> 00:02:13.915
This was the start, in my life.

00:02:13.915 --> 00:02:17.256
And seventeen years later, I did go to college; but I naively chose a college which was almost as

00:02:17.256 --> 00:02:25.492
expensive as Stanford, and all of my working class parents' savings were being spent

00:02:25.492 --> 00:02:27.772
on my college tuition.

00:02:27.772 --> 00:02:33.581
After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,

00:02:33.581 --> 00:02:36.942
and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

00:02:36.942 --> 00:02:40.995
And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.

00:02:40.995 --> 00:02:47.833
So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.

00:02:47.833 --> 00:02:53.778
It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

00:02:53.778 --> 00:02:54.756
(laughter)

00:02:54.756 --> 00:02:59.420
The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me,

00:02:59.420 --> 00:03:04.754
and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

00:03:04.754 --> 00:03:10.584
It wasn't all romantic.I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms.

00:03:10.584 --> 00:03:14.663
I returned Coke bottles for the five cents deposits to buy food with,

00:03:14.663 --> 00:03:19.435
and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good one meal

00:03:19.435 --> 00:03:23.708
a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.

00:03:23.708 --> 00:03:27.941
And much of what I stumbled into, by following my curiosity and intuition turned

00:03:27.941 --> 00:03:30.248
out to be priceless later on.

00:03:30.248 --> 00:03:35.752
Let me give you one example; Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best

00:03:35.752 --> 00:03:41.245
calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label

00:03:41.245 --> 00:03:45.283
on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed.

00:03:45.283 --> 00:03:50.413
Because I had dropped out, and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take

00:03:50.413 --> 00:03:55.873
a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif type faces,

00:03:55.873 --> 00:04:00.645
about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great

00:04:00.645 --> 00:04:03.810
typography great.

00:04:03.810 --> 00:04:09.968
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle, in a way that science can't capture,

00:04:09.968 --> 00:04:12.044
and I found it fascinating.

00:04:12.044 --> 00:04:16.916
None of these had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

00:04:16.916 --> 00:04:23.364
But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

00:04:23.364 --> 00:04:28.995
And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

00:04:28.995 --> 00:04:33.832
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the mac would've never had

00:04:33.832 --> 00:04:37.162
multiple type faces or proportionally spaced fonts.

00:04:37.162 --> 00:04:41.704
And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them

00:04:41.704 --> 00:04:49.878
(laughter and applause)

00:04:49.878 --> 00:04:54.500
If I had never dropped out, I would've never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal

00:04:54.500 --> 00:04:58.198
computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

00:04:58.198 --> 00:05:02.441
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college,

00:05:02.441 --> 00:05:06.629
but it was very, very clear looking backwards, ten years later.

00:05:06.629 --> 00:05:12.639
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.

00:05:12.639 --> 00:05:16.272
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

00:05:16.272 --> 00:05:20.909
You have to trust in something, your God, destiny, life, karma, whatever,

00:05:20.909 --> 00:05:26.101
because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence

00:05:26.101 --> 00:05:31.001
to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will

00:05:31.001 --> 00:05:38.584
make all the diference.

00:05:38.584 --> 00:05:43.109
My second story, is about love, and loss.

00:05:43.109 --> 00:05:49.000
I was lucky, I found what I love to do, early in life. Woz and I started Apple in

00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:53.335
my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard, and in ten years,

00:05:53.335 --> 00:05:57.702
Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage, into a two billion dollar company

00:05:57.702 --> 00:06:02.607
with over four thousand employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh,

00:06:02.607 --> 00:06:08.476
a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty. And then I got fired.

00:06:08.476 --> 00:06:14.408
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired

00:06:14.408 --> 00:06:18.299
someone whom I thought was very talented, to run the company with me.

00:06:18.299 --> 00:06:23.361
And for the first years or so, things went well, but then our visions of the future began to diverge.

00:06:23.361 --> 00:06:28.262
and eventually we ended up falling out. And when we did, our board of directors sided with him.

00:06:28.262 --> 00:06:33.962
And so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my

00:06:33.962 --> 00:06:37.994
entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

00:06:37.994 --> 00:06:42.751
I really didn't know what to do for a few months, I felt that I'd let the previous generation of

00:06:42.751 --> 00:06:47.880
entrepeneurs down, that I'd dropped the batton as it was being passed to me.

00:06:47.880 --> 00:06:53.969
I met with David Packard an Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

00:06:53.969 --> 00:06:57.939
I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the valley.

00:06:57.939 --> 00:07:03.832
But something slowly begun to dawn on me, I still loved what I did.

00:07:03.832 --> 00:07:09.501
The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected, but I

00:07:09.501 --> 00:07:16.171
was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it

00:07:16.171 --> 00:07:20.669
turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could've ever happened to me.

00:07:20.669 --> 00:07:25.917
The heavyness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,

00:07:25.917 --> 00:07:30.699
less sure about everything. It freed me to one of the most creative periods of my life.

00:07:30.699 --> 00:07:35.497
During the next five years, I started a company named Next, another company name Pixar,

00:07:35.497 --> 00:07:39.753
and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

00:07:39.753 --> 00:07:43.921
Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film; Toy Story,

00:07:43.921 --> 00:07:48.160
and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

00:07:48.160 --> 00:07:49.902
(applause)

00:07:49.902 --> 00:07:55.247
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple and the technology

00:07:55.247 --> 00:08:00.971
we developed at Next is at heart of Apple's current renassaince. And Lereen and I