Sabitlenmiş Tweet
This is Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories from his life.
He opens by admitting he never finished college himself, so this is the nearest he’s come to a graduation. Then he lays out his three stories.
The first is about connecting the dots. He dropped out of Reed College because he couldn’t justify draining his working-class parents’ savings on classes he didn’t care about. Free of requirements, he sat in on a calligraphy course purely out of curiosity. It seemed useless at the time, but a decade later it shaped the Macintosh’s typography. His lesson: you can’t connect the dots looking forward, only backward, so you have to trust that they’ll eventually link up.
The second is about love and loss. He built Apple with Steve Wozniak from a garage into a $2 billion company, then got fired at thirty from the company he founded. It was devastating and public, but he realized he still loved the work. That freedom let him start NeXT and Pixar, meet his wife, and eventually return to Apple. Getting fired, he says, turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. The takeaway: find work you love and don’t settle.
The third is about death. After being diagnosed with what looked like terminal pancreatic cancer (later found to be a rare curable form), he reflected on mortality as a clarifying force that strips away everything but what truly matters. He urges graduates not to waste their limited time living someone else’s life or being drowned out by others’ opinions, but to follow their own heart and intuition.
He closes with the line from the final Whole Earth Catalog that he’s always wished for himself, and now wishes for them: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
English
