"Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish"

BY JACK MACKENZIE, CGCS Hole Notes Editor North Oaks Golf Club

(Editor's Note: The following is a es that didn't interest me and begin drop- typography If I had never dropped in on Transcript of a Commencement Speech at ping in on the ones that looked far more that single course in college, the Mac Stanford given by Steve Jobs in June of2005. interesting. would have never had multiple typefaces Jobs died on October 5, 2011.) It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Thank you. I'm honored to be with you dorm room, so I slept on the floor in Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely today for your commencement from one friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for that no personal computer would have of the finest universities in the world. the five-cent deposits to buy food with, them. Truth be told, I never graduated from col- and I would walk the seven miles across If I had never dropped out, I would lege and this is the closest I've ever gotten town every Sunday night to get one good have never dropped in on that calligraphy to a college graduation. meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I class and personals computers might not Today I want to tell you three stories have the wonderful typography that they from my life. That's it. No big deal, just do. three stories. The first story is about con- Of course, it was impossible to connect necting the dots. "Your time is limited, the dots looking forward when I was in I dropped out of Reed College after the so don't waste it living college, but it was very, very clear looking first six months but then stayed around as backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't a drop-in for another eighteen months or someone else's life. Don't connect the dots looking forward. You can so before I really quit. So why did I drop be trapped by dogma, which only connect them looking backwards, so out? It started before I was born. My bio- is living with the results of you have to trust that the dots will some- logical mother was a young, unwed grad- how connect in your future. You have to uate student, and she decided to put me other people's thinking. trust in something -your gut, destiny, life, up for adoption. She felt very strongly Don't let the noise of karma, whatever -because believing that that I should be adopted by college gradu- the dots will connect down the road will ates, so everything was all set for me to be others' opinions drown out give you the confidence to follow your adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, your own inner voice, heart, even when it leads you off the well- except that when I popped out, they heart and intuition/' worn path, and that will make all the dif- decided at the last minute that they really ference. wanted a girl. So my parents, who were My second story is about love and on a waiting list, got a call in the middle - Steve Jobs loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to of the night asking, "We've got an unex- do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in pected baby boy. Do you want him?" They my parents' garage when I was twenty. said, "Of course." My biological mother loved it. And much of what I stumbled We worked hard and in ten years, Apple found out later that my mother had never into by following my curiosity and intu- had grown from just the two of us in a graduated from college and that my father ition turned out to be priceless later on. garage into a $2 billion company with had never graduated from high school. Let me give you one example. over 4,000 employees. We'd just released She refused to sign the final adoption Reed College at that time offered per- our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year papers. She only relented a few months haps the best calligraphy instruction in the earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then later when my parents promised that I country. Throughout the campus every I got fired. How can you get fired from a would go to college. poster, every label on every drawer was company you started? Well, as Apple This was the start in my life. And sev- beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I grew, we hired someone who I thought enteen years later, I did go to college, but I had dropped out and didn't have to take was very talented to run the company naively chose a college that was almost as the normal classes, I decided to take a cal- with me, and for the first year or so, expensive as Stanford and all of my work- ligraphy class to learn how to do this. I things went well. But then our visions of ing-class parents' savings were being learned about serif and sans-serif type- the future began to diverge, and eventual- spent on my college tuition. After six faces, about varying the amount of space ly we had a falling out. When we did, our months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had between different letter combinations, board of directors sided with him, and so no idea what I wanted to do with my life, about what makes great typography great. at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. and no idea of how college was going to It was beautiful, historical, artistically sub- What had been the focus of my entire help me figure it out, and here I was, tle in a way that science can't capture, and adult life was gone, and it was devastat- spending all the money my parents had I found it fascinating. ing. I really didn't know what to do for a saved their entire life. So I decided to drop None of this had even a hope of any few months. I felt that I had let the previ- out and trust that it would all work out practical application in my life. But 10 ous generation of entrepreneurs down, OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but years later when we were designing the that I had dropped the baton as it was looking back, it was one of the best deci- first Macintosh computer, it all came back being passed to me. sions I ever made. The minute I dropped to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. (Continued on Page 29) out, I could stop taking the required class- It was the first computer with beautiful In Bounds- answer has been "no" for too many days but my wife, who was there, told me that in a row, I know I need to change some- when they viewed the cells under a micro- (Continued from Page 28) thing. Remembering that I'll be dead soon scope, the doctor started crying, because it is the most important thing I've ever turned out to be a very rare form of pan- I met with David Packard and Bob encountered to help me make the big creatic cancer that is curable with surgery. Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing choices in life, because almost everything I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am up so badly. I was a very public failure -all external expectations, all pride, all fine now. and I even thought about running away fear of embarrassment or failure - these This was the closest I've been to facing from the Valley. But something slowly things just fall away in the face of death, death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a began to dawn on me. I still loved what I leaving only what is truly important. few more decades. Having lived through did. The turn of events at Apple had not Remembering that you are going to die it, I can now say this to you with a bit changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but is the best way I know to avoid the trap of more certainty than when death was a I was still in love. And so I decided to thinking you have something to lose. You useful but purely intellectual concept. No start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned are already naked. There is no reason not one wants to die, even people who want out that getting fired from Apple was the to follow your heart. to go to Heaven don't want to die to get best thing that could have ever happened About a year ago, I was diagnosed there, and yet, death is the destination we to me. The heaviness of being successful with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the all share. No one has ever escaped it. And was replaced by the lightness of being a morning and it clearly showed a tumor on that is as it should be, because death is beginner again, less sure about every- very likely the single best invention of life. thing. It freed me to enter one of the most It's life's change agent; it clears out the old creative periods in my life. During the to make way for the new, right now, the next five years I started a company named "You have to trust that new is you. But someday, not too long NeXT, another company named Pixar and from now, you will gradually become the fell in love with an amazing woman who the dots will somehow old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so would become my wife. Pixar went on to connect in your future. dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is create the world's first computer-animated You have to trust in limited, so don't waste it living someone feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, most successful animation studio in the something-your gut, which is living with the results of other world. destiny, life, karma, people's thinking. Don't let the noise of In a remarkable turn of events, Apple others' opinions drown out your own bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and whatever - because inner voice, heart and intuition. They the technology we developed at NeXT is believing that the dots somehow already know what you truly at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, will connect down the road want to become. Everything else is sec- and Lorene and I have a wonderful family ondary. together. will give you the confidence When I was young, there was an amaz- I'm pretty sure none of this would have to follow your heart, ing publication called The Whole Earth happened if I hadn't been fired from even when it leads you Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I my generation. It was created by a fellow guess the patient needed it. Sometimes off the well-worn path, named Stuart Brand not far from here in life's going to hit you in the head with a and that will make Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that his poetic touch. This was in the late the only thing that kept me going was that all the difference/' Sixties, before personal computers and I loved what I did. You've got to find what - Steve Jobs desktop publishing, so it was all made you love, and that is as true for work as it with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid is for your lovers. Your work is going to Cameras; it was sort of like Google in fill a large part of your life, and the only my pancreas. I didn't even know what a paperback form thirty-five years before way to be truly satisfied is to do what you pancreas was. The doctors told me this Google came along. I was idealistic, over- believe is great work, and the only way to was almost certainly a type of cancer that flowing with neat tools and great notions. do great work is to love what you do. If is incurable, and that I should expect to Stuart and his team put out several issues you haven't found it yet, keep looking, live no longer than three to six months. of The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then and don't settle. As with all matters of the My doctor advised me to go home and get when it had run its course, they put out a heart, you'll know when you find it, and my affairs in order, which is doctors' code final issue. It was the mid-70s and I was like any great relationship it just gets bet- for "prepare to die." It means to try and your age. On the back cover of their final ter and better as the years roll on. So keep tell your kids everything you thought issue was a photograph of an early morn- looking. Don't settle. you'd have the next 10 years to tell them, ing country road, the kind you might find My third story is about death. When I in just a few months. It means to make yourself hitchhiking on if you were so was 171 read a quote that went something sure that everything is buttoned up so that adventurous. Beneath were the words, like "If you live each day as if it was your it will be as easy as possible for your fami- "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their last, someday you'll most certainly be ly. It means to say your goodbyes. farewell message as they signed off. "Stay right." It made an impression on me, and I lived with that diagnosis all day Later hungry, stay foolish." And I have always since then, for the past 33 years, I have that evening I had a biopsy where they wished that for myself, and now, as you looked in the mirror every morning and stuck an endoscope down my throat, graduate to begin anew, I wish that for asked myself, "If today were the last day through my stomach into my intestines, you. Stay hungry, stay foolish. of my life, would I want to do what I am put a needle into my pancreas and got a Thank you all, very much. - Steve Jobs about to do today?" And whenever the few cells from the tumor. I was sedated

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