Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your
commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 but then
stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an
unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course."
My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to
college, but I naïvely 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here
I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent
deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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
fllowing 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 sans-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
that calligraphy class and personals 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
10 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--
because believing that the dots will connect down the road will
give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads
you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years,
Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2
billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released
our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned
thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 world's 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 and I returned to
Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of
Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and
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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and
tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten
years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure
that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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's 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's 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, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my
generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand
not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with
his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google
came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and
great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the
The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course,
they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.

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III. Keith's Point of View: µL»Ý¤Ó³Ð·s¡A´N¯à³Ð·s