Jobs and his three stories

(1)On a warm June day in 2005, Steve Jobs went to his first college graduation – as the commencement speaker. The billionaire founder and leader of Apple Computer was more than just a businessman. Though only fifty years old, the college dropout was a technology rock star, a living legend to millions of people around the world.

(2)In his early twenties, Jobs almost single-handedly introduced the world to the first computer that could sit on your desk and do something all by itself. He revolutionized the way people listened to music with a fashionable little music player called the iPod. He started a new company called Pixar that made the most amazing computer-animated movies – Toy Story, Cars, and Finding Nemo. Already in development on that June day, were his greatest technological achievements – the iPhone and the iPad. The father of four would be repeatedly compared with othet inventors in history who introduced affordable, life-changing conveniences that transformed the way Americans lived.

(3)Yet for all his successes, Jobs also endured some very public failures. When he was thirty years old, he was fired from Apple for being too difficult to work with. He could get angry quickly, screaming at co-workers, competitors, and reporters. He sometimes cried when things didn’t go his way and he regularly took credit for the ideas of others. He could be both charming and irritating, sensitive and cruel. He was both loved and hated, intensely admired and widely dismissed. People described him with the strongest words: visionary, showman, artist, bully, genius, jerk.

(4)Wearing blue jeans and sandals under his graduation-day robe, Jobs stepped up to the microphone to speak in the same way he did just about everything: with intensity and passion.

(5) “Today I want to tell you three stories from my life, ” he said.

(6) “The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of ReedCollegeafter the first 6 months. That allowed me to take the classes I wanted. I decided to take a calligraphy class. Ten years later, it all came back to me and we designed it all into the Mac. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderfully-shaped letters that you see on the screen. 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 instincts, destiny, life, whatever.”

(7) “My second story is about love and loss. I got fired. 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. Then, Apple bought NeXT, and I returned to Apple. The technology developed at NeXT was put into the iPod and future Apple products. 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. You’ve got to find what you love. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

(8) “My third story is about death. My doctors told me I had cancer. No one wants to die. And yet death is the destination we all share. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. When I was young, there was an amazing magazine. On the back cover of their final issue were the words: “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.”

(9)No more. They were just three simple stories that defined an amazing life and provided a guide for people at the beginning of their adult lives. To understand who Steve Jobs was and what he became, it is necessary to hear those three simple stories, again and again.