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thank you

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I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.

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Truth be told, I've never graduated from college. This is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

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Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

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The first story is about: "Connecting the dots."

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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.

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So why did I drop out?

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It started before I was born.

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My biological mother was a young, unwed college 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 graduates, so everything was all set

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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 a 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 later found out 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.

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She only relented a few months later 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 17 years later I did go to college.

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But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford,

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and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.

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After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.

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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.

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And here I was spending all of 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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he minute I dropped out

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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 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 5¢ deposits to buy food with,

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and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night

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to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

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I loved it.

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And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

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Let me give you one example:

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Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.

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Throughout the campus every poster, every label 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,

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I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

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I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great 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 this 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,

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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,

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the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces 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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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.

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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 gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

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Because believe in the dots 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 would make all the difference

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My second story is about love and loss.

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I was lucky...I found what I loved to do early in life.

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Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20.

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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.

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We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.

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And then I got fired.

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How can you get fired from a company you started?

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Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me,

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and for the first year or so things went well.

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But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.

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When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.

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So at 30 I was out.

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And very publicly out.

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What had been the focus of my 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.

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I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down,

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that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.

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I met with David Packard and 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 began to dawn on me:

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I still LOVED what I did.

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The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.

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I had been rejected, but I was still in love.

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And so I decided to start over.

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I didn't see it then,

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but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

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The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

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It freed me to enter 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 named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

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Pixar went on to create the worlds 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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In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT,I returned to Apple,

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and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.

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And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

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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.

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Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.

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Don't lose faith.

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I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

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You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

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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.

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And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

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If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.

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As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

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And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

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So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

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My third story is about death.

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When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like:

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"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."

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It made an impression on me,

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and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:

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"If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

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And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something,

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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.

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Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure

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these things just fall away in the face of death,

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leaving only what is truly important.

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Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

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You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

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About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.

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I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,

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and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

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I didn't even know what a pancreas was

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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.

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My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order,

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which is doctor's code for: Prepare to die..

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It means to try to tell your kids everything

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you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them

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in just a few months.

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It means to make sure everything is buttoned up

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so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.

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It means to say your goodbyes.

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I lived with that diagnosis all day.

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Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat,

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through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

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I was sedated,

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but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying

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because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

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I had the surgery and thankfully I'm fine now.

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This was the closest I've been to facing death,

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and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.

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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:

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No one wants to die.

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Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

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And yet death is the destination we all share.

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No one has ever escaped it.

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And that is as it should be,

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because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.

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It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

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Right now the new is you,

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but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

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Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

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Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

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Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

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Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

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And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

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They somehow already know

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what you truly want to become.

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Everything else is secondary.

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When I was young,

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there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,

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which was one of the bibles of my generation.

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It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,

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and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

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This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing,

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so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras.

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It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along:

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it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

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Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,

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and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.

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On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road,

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the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

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Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

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It was their farewell message as they signed off.

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Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

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nd I have always wished that for myself.

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And now, as you graduate to begin a new, I wish that for you.

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Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

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Thank you all very much.

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Subt. made by: Lion Heart from The Netherlands