Stanford Speech

Beginning

[Paragraph]

[00:22.0] Thank you.
[00:27.5] I am honored to be with you today for your commencement
- commencement = 卒業式
[00:30.8] from one of the finest universities in the world.
[00:36.5] Truth be told, I never graduated from college.
[00:41.7] And this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.
[00:48.5] Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.
[00:52.0] That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

Connecting the dots

[Paragraph]

[00:56.4] The first story is about connecting the dots.
[01:01.4] I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months,
[01:04.6] but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.
- drop-in = 大学において、正規の学生ではないが聴講する者
[01:09.8] So why did I drop out?
[01:13.0] It started before I was born.
[01:15.8] My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student,
- unwed = 未婚の
[01:20.0] and she decided to put me up for adoption.
[01:23.0] She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,
[01:26.8] so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.
[01:32.5] Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
- at the last minute = 直前になって、いよいよという時に、ぎりぎりになってから
[01:38.5] So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking:
[01:44.0] “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?”
[01:48.0] They said: “Of course.”
[01:51.5] My biological mother found out later
[01:53.8] that my mother had never graduated from college
[01:56.5] and that my father had never graduated from high school.
[01:59.5] She refused to sign the final adoption papers.
[02:04.0] She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
- relent = 折れる
[02:10.0] This was the start in my life.

[Paragraph]

[02:14.5] And 17 years later I did go to college.
[02:18.0] But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford,
[02:23.0] and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition.
- tuition = 授業料
[02:28.2] After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it.
[02:31.3] I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life
[02:33.9] and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
[02:37.3] And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.
[02:43.1] So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.
[02:48.0] It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

[Paragraph]

[02:54.5] The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me,
[03:00.2] and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

[Paragraph]

[03:05.3] It wasn’t all romantic.
[03:07.0] I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms,
[03:11.0] I returned coke bottles for the $0.05 deposits to buy food with,
[03:15.0] and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night
[03:18.8] to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
[03:22.5] I loved it.
[03:24.0] And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition
[03:28.3] turned out to be priceless later on.

[Paragraph]

[03:30.5] Let me give you one example:
[03:33.5] Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
- calligraphy = 書道
[03:38.5] Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed.
[03:46.0] Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes,
[03:50.0] I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
[03:53.5] I learned about serif and san serif typefaces,
[03:56.5] about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations,
[04:00.2] about what makes great typography great.
[04:03.5] It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture,
[04:10.0] and I found it fascinating.

[Paragraph]

[04:12.5] None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
[04:18.0] But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.
[04:23.9] And we designed it all into the Mac.
[04:26.5] It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
[04:29.8] If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,
[04:33.5] the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
[04:37.8] And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

[Paragraph]

[04:50.3] If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,
[04:54.6] and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
[04:58.7] Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
[05:03.4] But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

[Paragraph]

[05:07.5] Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward;
[05:10.5] you can only connect them looking backwards.
[05:13.3] So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
[05:17.0] You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
[05:22.3] Because believing that the dots will connect down the road
[05:25.5] will give you the confidence to follow your heart
[05:28.3] even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.
- well-worn = 使い古した、着古した、陳腐な、月並みな

Love and loss

[Paragraph]

[05:39.1] My second story is about love and loss.
[05:44.5] I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life.
[05:48.8] Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20.
[05:52.3] We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage
[05:57.0] into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.
[06:00.5] We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier,
[06:04.2] and I had just turned 30.
[06:06.6] And then I got fired.

[Paragraph]

[06:09.3] How can you get fired from a company you started?
[06:12.9] Well, as Apple grew
[06:14.9] we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me,
[06:18.9] and for the first year or so things went well.
[06:21.4] But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.
[06:26.0] When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.
[06:29.5] So at 30 I was out.
[06:31.5] And very publicly out.
[06:33.5] What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

[Paragraph]

[] 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.

[Paragraph]

[] The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
[] I had been rejected, but I was still in love.
[] And so I decided to start over.

[Paragraph]

[] 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 of my life.

[Paragraph]

[] 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, I returned to Apple,
[] and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.
[] And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

[Paragraph]

[] 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 is 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.

Death

[Paragraph]

[] 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.

[Paragraph]

[] 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.

[Paragraph]

[] 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.

[Paragraph]

[] My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order,
[] which is doctor’s code for prepare to die.
[] It means to try and tell your kids everything
[] you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.
[] It means to make sure everything is buttoned up
[] so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.
[] It means to say your goodbyes.

[Paragraph]

[] 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 and 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 doctors 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’m fine now.

[Paragraph]

[] 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 is Life’s change agent.
[] It clears out the old to make way for the new.

[Paragraph]

[] 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 is quite true.

[Paragraph]

[] 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.
[] They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
[] Everything else is secondary.

[Paragraph]

[] When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
[] which was one of the bibles of my generation.
[] It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,
[] and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
[] This was in the late 1960’s, 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, 35 years before Google came along:
[] it was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

[Paragraph]

[] Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
[] and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
[] It was the mid-1970s, 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 it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
[] t was their farewell message as they signed off.
[] Stay Hungry.
[] Stay Foolish.

[Paragraph]

[] 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.