Podcast Spotlight: Steve Jobs' Commencement Speech
by Laurie Gunning Grossman
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” - Steve Jobs
Graduation celebrations have been flooding my social media feeds lately. I love seeing these big life moments and transitions. It’s so beautiful, exciting, and sentimental. I’ll personally be going through this next year when my son graduates from high school, and you better believe I’ll need to stock up on the tissues.
So it’s no surprise that with graduation ceremonies on my mind, I stumbled upon Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford University.
Quotes from his speech have been shared across the internet for years, but I don’t think I’ve ever listened to the entire speech.
It was on The Resilient Mind podcast where I found this episode: Stanford Commencement Address – Steve Jobs.
It’s an easy 15 minute listen, packed with the old one-two inspo punch. Or, in his case the old one-two-three punch, as Jobs shares three stories from his life.
Jobs, the visionary entrepreneur and creator behind Apple Inc., never graduated from college. He dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, and then stayed around as a “drop-in” for another 18 months before he fully quit. In his speech he shares about this journey.
What I love is that we can all adopt some of his ideas and philosophies for designing our lives and our future.
In Jobs’ speech, he talks about:
CONNECTING THE DOTS
As Jobs says, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.”
He left college because he says that the required classes didn’t interest him. So he dropped out, and instead “dropped in” to the classes that looked interesting to him – the ones that fed his curiosity and intuition. One class was on calligraphy instruction, which taught him the principle of typography, and how it is “beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.” While not a practical application at the time, Jobs says that 10 years later it came back to him, and he and his team used this knowledge to design the Mac – the first computer with beautiful typography.
“It was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college,” says Jobs. “But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.”
LOVE AND LOSS
Jobs shares that he worked hard on Apple for 10 years, growing the company that started with just him and Steve Wozniak working in his parents’ garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. And then … he was fired. (He explains why and how in the episode.)
He says he was devastated, didn’t know what to do, and felt he had let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs. That he had dropped the baton after it was passed to him.
Yet, what also happened was the realization that he still loved what he did – and this event didn’t change that. As he says, “I had been rejected, but I was still in love.”
And so, he decided to start over and he became a beginner again. He realized that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him. The heaviness of success was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner. As he says, it freed him to enter one of the most creative periods of his life. (Think creating Pixar, falling in love with his future wife, and starting the company NeXT, which was later bought by Apple. Yes, Apple. Amazing.) Of course, as we all know, he eventually ended up returning back to his company.
In his speech, Jobs shares, “Sometimes life hits 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 your 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. 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 until you find it. Don’t settle.”
DEATH
“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. 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.”
His recommendation? To live each day as if it was your last, because one day you’ll most certainly be right.
He shared that he would often look in the mirror and ask himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” When the answer was “no” too many days in a row, it was a sign that something needed to change.
Towards the end of Jobs’ speech, he encouraged the Stanford graduates with these words:
“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. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition … Everything else is secondary.”
Keep holding the light.
Listen Here
Beautiful and resonant! ✨✨