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Staff post about: Steve Jobs Become an Author

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On June 12, 2005, graduates of Stanford University were treated to Apple founder Steve Jobs’ Commencement address. A college dropout himself, Jobs opened his speech by saying, “Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.” Now one of the most respected names in the computer industry, Jobs was invited to the Ivy League school to share his advice and experience with the up-and-coming leaders.

Jobs began his speech by telling three stories to convey the factors most important to his impressive success over the past three decades. The first story was about what Jobs called “connecting the dots” – experiences in his life that, at the time, seemingly meant little at all. However, down the road, the significance of even the tiniest events would reveal themselves to Jobs.

One such case is the calligraphy course Jobs enrolled in at Reed College. He had already dropped out of the school officially, and was thus free to take any courses he wanted. Here, he learned about everything from serif and san serif typefaces to the varying amount of space between different letter combinations. “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life,” Jobs said. “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 typology.”

Jobs notes that if he had never dropped in on that calligraphy class, the Mac as the world knows it today would never have the multiple typefaces and proportional fonts that it does. That is what Jobs means by connecting the dots, something which can only be done when looking backwards. “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future,” he says. “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.”

The second story in Steve Jobs’ Commencement speech was that of “love and loss.” Having discovered his passion early on in life, Jobs was crushed when he was fired from the very company that he had helped found. However, it was that very passion of his that helped sustain him and put his career on the rebound. After starting up his second company, NeXT, followed by Pixar, which created the world’s first computer animated feature film, Apple bought out NeXT and brought Jobs back on board. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick,” Jobs said. “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”

The last story Jobs told was one about death. He came close to the brink after being diagnosed with cancer in 2004, and was even told that he would have no longer than three to six months to live. After doctors discovered it was in fact a rare and curable form of pancreatic cancer, Jobs recovered, but not before learning an important lesson. “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,” he told the students. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

The Steve Jobs’ Commencement address ended with four simple but powerful words of advice from the billionaire entrepreneur: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

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