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I've been an apple owner since 1990, long time. I remember the countless debates with PC owners. It was us, this small creative company and the rest. IT was fun.

Think it's a good time tp put up MR. Steve Job's commencement speech. EXTRAORDINARY"!


'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, 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 6 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 college 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out 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 someday go to college.

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 how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of 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 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¢ 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 san 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 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 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 this 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 gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz 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 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had 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. 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 had 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 of 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 worlds 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, 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 hits 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 your 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. 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 until you find it. 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 tool 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 doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to 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 everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

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 doctors 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 I'm 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 is 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 is 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 1960's, 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, and 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.
That's one of the most amazing things I've read in a long time. Pure inspiration right there
 
How is that sad?

10minutemail.com + knowing how to type because I'm not computer illiterate = an account.

An account + a tabbed browser = the ability to check back here for a couple seconds every 5-10 to see if there are any more hipsters crying about Jobs resigning.

Way to stereotype everyone here by using the term "Hipster". What if I called you fat, lazy, and ignorant? It can definitely go both ways.
 
So u wish death on someone because ur a windows guy? How about his wife and kids? Any compassion for them? It's obvious that u r just an ignorant jealous person. And Inferior products? That just shows how stupid and naive u really r. I'm no fanboy. I buy technology and gadgets based on how well their made and the thought that goes into them. I turned to apple because they make superior products. And what tablet is superior to iPad? Truth is that NONE OF THEM even come close.

How about the multitude of rugged Windows tablets that saw police and military use?

Face it. Just because Jobs made the idea popular doesn't mean he invented it.
 
Way to stereotype everyone here by using the term "Hipster". What if I called you fat, lazy, and ignorant? It can definitely go both ways.

I never said everyone here was a hipster. It's just that some stand out more than others.

coughcoughpeoplethatareliterallycryingoverthiscoughcough.
 
Sad to see you go

:eek: Willy Wonka is handing over the chocolate factory!

I wish I had a golden ticket :-/

We'll miss you, Steve. Hopefully you can still present new products!
 
Lol, people here make such a big deal out of someone who signs up to post something as if it were equivalent to buying a house.

His statement was fairly respectful, but my comment was really directed toward some of the other people that posted some fairly derogatory comments.
 
Canadian Similarities?

For those of us in Canada, this has a worrying similarity to Jack Layton, Leader of the Official Opposition, who announced he was stepping aside to battle cancer for a month or two and then he would be back. He died this week.

I hope Steve is just bowing out at a good time for the company when it will have the least impact. He deserves to see the amazing success that is going to continue.

Thank you for taking the risks Steve and letting creativity not profit prevail (and look what happens anyway!)
 
Not innovative at all.

Ever heard of Darwin BSD? Probably not. It's what Apple stole and based your OS off of. You want to know a close relative of BSD in general? Linux.

Take a wild guess how many app stores Linux has.

3+, last time I checked. The were doing that stuff years ago. There is NOTHING innovative about Apple. It's just that nobody catches them because they steal their ideas from obscure stuff.

If it is so easy to "steal" ideas from other products and turn them into products that people actually want to use and will pay money for, why is Apple the only one who seems to be able to do it? Last time I checked, Apple isn't exactly keeping it a secret that they based their OS off of BSD.
 
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I wish him well, though I think apple has done some seriously shady things I don't wish death on anyone (like the idiot that said he should die a slow painful death).

They are successful through successful marketing and manipulation of the media.
 
well my post was deleted for responding to this ninja character. i don't care what anyone says, they can say linux has had app stores and everyone started everything before apple. Bottom line is steve made it come together as one and work. its a shame that people can't at least respect someones health. perhaps we should all wish the same on one of your family members? NO? didn't think so. just face it, we are all here for something that is computer related, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop. without steve jobs, we may have never been having this convo. it is a cold hard fact. linux came AFTER, AFTER steve made the first personal computer. windows came after steve's first pc. wp7, and android came AFTER iOS(iPhone OS). i may be wrong, but don't think i am, if he hadn't made it in the first place, who would have and when?
 
No matter what you think about Steve Jobs, it doesn't change the fact that he saved Apple from blink of bankruptcy and made the Apple the most valued company in the world. That my friend, couldn't happen without Steve's laser focused vision.

Good news is that Steve still will be still involved as Chairman of the board.
 
well my post was deleted for responding to this ninja character. i don't care what anyone says, they can say linux has had app stores and everyone started everything before apple. Bottom line is steve made it come together as one and work. its a shame that people can't at least respect someones health. perhaps we should all wish the same on one of your family members? NO? didn't think so. just face it, we are all here for something that is computer related, phone, tablet, laptop, desktop. without steve jobs, we may have never been having this convo. it is a cold hard fact. linux came AFTER, AFTER steve made the first personal computer. windows came after steve's first pc. wp7, and android came AFTER iOS(iPhone OS). i may be wrong, but don't think i am, if he hadn't made it in the first place, who would have and when?

Unix pretty much came before everything.
 
How is that sad?

10minutemail.com + knowing how to type because I'm not computer illiterate = an account.

An account + a tabbed browser = the ability to check back here for a couple seconds every 5-10 to see if there are any more hipsters crying about Jobs resigning.

I love how nobody has a real comeback for the fact that even though you guys were raving about the App Store, Linux has had multiple App Stores for a long time now.

/b/tards aren't welcome around these parts.
 
A new era of personal computing may start.

We just may be able to return to the days of functionality over beauty. Jobs will no longer be able to milk people for their money by selling his products for much more than they're worth. We can return back to the time before Apple had to make everything proprietary. Macs could possibly even compete with PCs some day.

This momentous day will go down in history, and will forever hold a place in my heart.

Chill out. He's not dead, he's just not CEO.
 
No matter what you think about Steve Jobs, it doesn't change the fact that he saved Apple from blink of bankruptcy and made the Apple the most valued company in the world. That my friend, couldn't happen without Steve's laser focused vision.

Good news is that Steve still will be still involved as Chairman of the board.

The only reason Apple had 15 minutes of fame is because they make obscene profits off of Foxconn parts.
 
Thank you for the good times you gave all of your fans. I feel so luckily to have been alive durning the lifetime of two great visionaries, you and Walt Disney. You have both made my life a little better. Thank you for thinking different. :apple:
 
I read the news while I was at work - on the toilet, to be more specific - and I was quite surprised.

Goodbye Steve. I miss you and a lot of people will tell you the same.
 
Perhaps his cancer could have been treatable if he donated even a dollar to a cancer charity

no that would be too much to ask of him! worth 5bil+ and hasn't donated a cent except to political party leaders.. cough cough..

I didn't realize he made access to his tax returns public, or are you his CPA? :rolleyes:

Some people don't need to advertise their charitable contributions because they are not motivated by accolades. Some that do are trying to atone for a guilty conscience. Also, giving money is easy for the wealthy. Now time, that's another thing.
 
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