Steve Jobs, General Director of Apple Corporation and Pixar Animation studio, at the Graduates of Stanford diplomas on June 12, 2005

It is a great honor for me to be here today, at the ceremony of presenting diplomas of one of the best universities in the world. So it turned out that I do not have a diploma of higher education. In general, I must admit, now I'm closer to the end of the university than I had ever been. And today I want to tell you three stories from life. Only three stories.

The first is that everything in the world is interconnected

I threw the college, barely entering it, although I attended some classes for another one and a half years until I was completely deducted. Why did I leave?

This story began long before my birth. My biological mother was a young unmarried graduate student, even before giving birth to give me to adoption. At the same time, she was convinced that I had to get to people with higher education, and everything was arranged so that I ended up in the family of a lawyer. All – except one. At the very moment when I was born, a lawyer and his wife decided that they wanted a girl. And in the middle of the night in the house of my adoptive parents (they stood the following in the waiting sheet) a phone rang. “We have a boy,” said. – Want to adopt him?“Of course,” answered them. Later, my biological mother learned that the mother’s reception room has no university diploma, and dad has even a certificate of secondary education, and refused to sign documents on adoption. She softened only a couple of months later, when her parents promised that I would definitely go to college.

And now, after seventeen years, I went. But I naively chose an expensive college, almost like Stanford. All parental savings went to pay for classes. So six months have passed, and all this time I could not understand what a lot about this college. I had no idea what I want to do and how to study will help me find out. But I spent the money that my parents saved my whole life. So I decided to expel and just believe that everything will be fine. Then it was scary, but now, looking back, I understand that this is one of my best decisions. It was worth only quitting my studies, I could skip the obligatory activities and attend those that were interesting to me.

Life was not sugar. I did not have my room, and I slept on the floor in my friends rooms. For five cents, I handed over the Kola bottles to buy food, and went seven miles through the whole city every Sunday evening, so that once a week to eat normally in the Temple of Krishnas. But I liked it. Much of what I came across, doing things out of curiosity or in intuition, later it turned out to be simply invaluable. Here is at least one example ..

In those days, in my college they gave almost the best calligraphy lessons in the country. In the student campus, any poster, any sign on any box was carefully displayed by hand. And since I had quit my studies and I could not attend mandatory classes – I decided to resemble calligraphy lessons. I learned about the sets with the serifs and without the serifs, about the need to monitor inter -boiler intervals, about what makes the excellent typography of the beautiful – elegant, ancient, sophisticated, completely unable to understand the mind of the techie. I was fascinated.

There was nothing to think that calligraphy will somehow come in handy in my life. But ten years later, when we created the first “Mack”, I remembered about her. And we conveyed all that grace and sophistication to our creation. "Mack" was the first computer with excellent typography. But then I don’t get to calligraphy classes, not to see him different font schemes and the right intervals. And since Windows just copied Macintosh, it is possible that all personal computers would not see them. That is, if I had not abandoned college, then I would never have got into calligraphy lessons, and personal computers, perhaps, would never have acquired a wonderful typographic. Of course, I could not even assume this when I was expelled. But ten years later, I clearly saw the relationship.

Remember: you cannot predict all the coincidences, thinking about the future; But you can notice them, looking into the past. Just believe that everything will turn out in the future. You need to believe in something-in your fate, character, soul, karma, anything. This approach has never failed me, and it is to him that I owe all the changes in life.

My second story will be about love and loss

I was lucky – I found the case of my life early. Ice and I found Apple in the garage of my parents when I was only twenty. We worked a lot, and after ten years Apple turned into a company worth two billion dollars, a company with four thousand employees. When our best creation was https://betfred-gb-casino.co.uk/ born, Macintosh, I barely turned thirty. And then I was fired. How can you fire from a company, which you yourself found? Well, Apple grew up, and we hired a man – I thought, very talented, – so that he directed the company with me. At first everything went well. But a year later it turned out that we see the future of Apple in different ways, and in the end we quarreled. The board of directors took his side. And so at thirty years I flew out of Apple. And very publicly flew out. The meaning of all my adulthood disappeared, I felt completely devastated.

For several months I did not know what to do. I felt that I had failed the previous generation of entrepreneurs, that I dropped the relay wand. I met with David Packard, the founder of Hewlett-Packard, and Bob Neis, the founder of Intel, and tried to apologize for so terribly. It was such a public failure that I even thought to completely leave the business. But then an understanding came: but I still love what I do, and what happened in Apple cannot change this. They rejected me, but I still love. And I decided to start all over again.

Then, of course, I would not say that, but the dismissal from Apple was the best that ever happened to me. The burden of success was replaced by a frivolity of a beginner. I was free, and so one of the most creative periods of my life began.

In the next five years, I founded NEXT, another company – Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who became my wife. Pixar developed, there they created the world's first full -length cartoon, completely painted on the computer, “The History of toys”, and today it is the most successful animated studio in the world. Fate ordered that Apple bought Next, I returned, and the technology that we developed in NEXT formed the basis of today's Renaissance Apple. And Lorin and I have a wonderful family.

I am completely sure that none of these events would have happened if I had not been put out of Apple. It was like a medicine – disgusting to taste, but necessary for the patient. It happens that life beats you brick on the head. The main thing is not to lose faith. I am convinced: then only love for what I did then kept me afloat. It is important to find your love, not only in life, but also in work. Work will take the lion's share of your time, and you will feel in your place only if you believe that you are doing a great job. And it is impossible to do a great thing without love. If you have not found your love yet, so look. Do not stop. I assure you, you will feel when you find. And, like any real feeling, over the years, such love will only get stronger. Look for your love. Do not stop.

My third story is about death

At seventeen I came across such a phrase: “Live every day as if this is your last day, because one day it really will be the last”. Then I thought firmly and since then I ask myself every morning: “If today was the last day of my life, I would do what I am going to do now?"And if the answer is negative for several days in a row, I understand-you need to change something.

It is useful to keep in my head that death is close – it helped me make the most difficult decisions in life. Because almost everything-someone’s expectations, pride, embarrassment or fear of failure-dissolves in front of the face of death, leaving only really important things. This is such a trap: to think that we have something to lose. And there is no better way to get out of this trap than remember the death. Here you are – all in sight. There is no reason not to do what the heart tells you.

About a year ago I found cancer-they made a scan at half a half in the morning and said that the tumor was clearly visible in the pancreas. I did not even know what the pancreas is. The doctors were almost sure that the tumor was incurable and that I had to live from three to six months. I was advised to put things in order – that in the medical language it means "getting ready for death". So in a couple of months to tell your children what you were going to tell them for ten years. So make sure that all what has begun is completed and that you have done everything possible for your relatives. So – say: "Goodbye".

With this diagnosis, I lived all day. Later, in the evening, they made a biopsy for me – they stuck an endoscope through the throat in the stomach, climbed into the guts, stuck the needle into the pancreas and pinch off several cells from the tumor – for analysis – for analysis. I was under anesthesia, but my wife said that when she saw these cells under a microscope, the doctors screamed with joy – it turned out that I had a very rare form of cancer: the tumor could be removed. It was removed, and here I am healthy again.

Then I met death face to face – and I hope that so close we will not see each other for a few more decades. The death was a terrible, but absolutely speculative thing before this meeting. Now, having visited the edge, I will tell you with even more confidence.

Nobody wants to die. Even those who want to get into heaven do not want to die for this. However, death is the end point for each of us. Nobody managed to escape from death. It should be so because death, I tend to believe, the best invention of life. Death is the basis of any changes. She removes the old one, giving the road to the new. Now this is new – you, but a little you will grow old and one day, after not too many years, grow old and will be removed from the road. Sorry for the excessive drama, but it is.

Your time is limited, so do not waste it, living someone else's life. Do not listen to the dogma. Dogma is the fabrications of other people. Do not allow other people's opinions to drown out your own inner voice. And the most important thing is to find the courage to follow your intuition and behesting the heart. From somewhere they already know who you really want to become. Everything else does not matter.

When I was a teenager, I read the “Catalog of All the Earth”, the real Bible of my generation made with the soul. The Catalog was published by a man named Stuart Brand-here, nearby, in Menlo-Park. In the yard, then there was the end of the sixties. There were neither personal computers, nor desktop publishing systems – only scissors, polaries and printing machines. For us, the catalog was a kind of Google in a paper cover-thirty-five years before Google appeared-an idealistic creation, full of clear instructions and great ideas.

In the mid -seventies (I was just your age), Stuart and the team released a farewell room. On the rear cover of this number there was a photograph: the early morning, leaving a country road into the distance – perhaps on such roads, if you loved adventures, you had to drive hitchhiking. And from below it was written: “Be hungry. Be reckless ". These were their farewell words. Be hungry. Be reckless. I always wanted it for myself. Now that you leave these walls to start a new life, I wish you the same.

Be hungry. Be reckless.

Thank you very much.