He was born to Joanne Simpson and an Egyptian Arab father (name unknown) in
Green Bay, Wisconsin.  (Mona Simpson, a novelist, is his biological
sister.)  He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View,
California in February 1955. He was not happy at school in Mountain View so
the family moved to Los Altos, California, where Steven attended Homestead
High School. His electronics teacher at Homestead High, Hohn McCollum,
recalled he was "something of a loner" and "always had a different way of
looking at things." 

Today, Steven Paul Jobs is a leading figure in the computer industry.  More
popularly known as Steve Jobs, he is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of
Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, and Pixar, the Academy-Award-winning
animation studios which he co-founded in 1986.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple
II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh.
Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its
award-winning desktop and notebook computers, OS X operating system, and
iLife and professional applications. Apple is also leading the digital
music revolution with its iPod portable music players and iTunes online
music store.

Pixar has created six of the most successful and beloved animated films of
all time: Academy Award-winning "Toy Story" (1995); "A Bug's Life" (1998);
"Toy Story 2" (1999); "Monsters, Inc." (2001); Academy Award-winning
"Finding Nemo" (2003); and "The Incredibles" (2004). Pixar's six films have
grossed more than $3 billion at the worldwide box office to date.

Last June 14, 2005, Steve Jobs delivered a very thought-provoking
commencement address at the Stanford University.  A friend sent me the
transcript of his message.  Let me share it to you, dear readers, as it
gave some eye-opener to those who have just graduated from college - or
even to those who are already working.

Read on.

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. I
dropped out of Reed College 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 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 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 of 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. 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 5-cent deposits to buy
food with, and I would walk the 7 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 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
10 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 backward 10 years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect
them looking backward, 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 loved to
do early in life. Woz [Steve Wozniak] 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 in 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's first computer-animated feature
film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in 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 Laurene 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. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose
faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I
loved what I did.

You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for
your lovers. 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, and
the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found
it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart,
you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets
better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

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 thing 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
doctors' code for prepare to die. It means to try and tell your kids
everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a
few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it
will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your good-byes.

I lived 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 my 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, thankfully, I am fine now.

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

Thank you all very much.

ooOoo