Steve Jobs - TED - How To Live Before You Die - Subtitled in English

(1955 - 2011) Rest In Peace - Apple Co-Finder Steve Jobs in 2005 giving his Stanford Commencement Address

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(applause)

Thank you

I'm honoured 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 wanna 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 college after the first

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

before I really quitted. 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 graudates.

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 the 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 which 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 OK.

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

(laughter)

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 cents deposits to buy food with,

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

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 these 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've never had

multiple type faces or proportionally spaced fonts.

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

(laughter and applause)

If I had never dropped out, I would've 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 God, 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 diference.

My second story, is about love, and loss.

I was lucky, I found what I love 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 two billion dollar company

with over four thousand 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 whom I thought was very talented, to run the company with me.

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

and eventually we ended up falling out. And 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'd let the previous generation of

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

I met with David Packard an 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 begun 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've ever happened to me.

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

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

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

(applause)

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

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