Jobs Stanford スピーチ

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. 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 six months. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and walked the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week. I fell in love with the beauty of great typography. 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. 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. 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. 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. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma. If you try to live up to everyone else's expectations, you will never discover your own path. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.