这样的下午，我一个人坐在空荡荡的屋子里，把所有的窗户打开，看着窗帘不时的飘着。没有电视的噪音，或音乐的打扰，只有外面的清脆鸟叫。

这样的下午，没事看看窗外的阳光，仰望淡蓝的天空，闭着眼用力吸入被太阳晒过的空气，好像空气的流动声音都可以听得见，即使只是很细微的风吹过，我也很欣慰地享受它带来的清凉。

这样的下午，没有时间表，可以异想天开做一些自己很久没做过的事情，或在网上搜到让人垂涎的菜谱，然后记下来，塞上耳机慢悠悠的溜达到超市，买晚上做菜的材料。

这样的下午，让我想起伦敦夏天的最好那一天，那是绝对让所有人好心情的天气，不冷不热，阳光明媚，清风浮面。可以穿着短衣短裤去公园野餐，躺着晒太阳，听音乐，照无聊的照片。

这样的下午，让我怀念在伦敦的每一秒，我享受所有经历过的笑声和泪水，一点也不想要改变任何一个决定和结果。没有后悔，只有数不清的满足和让我会心傻笑的回忆。英国的八年，我从一个没有自己做过任何事的高中生，成长到现在可以养活自己的上班族，多了一点常识，多了一点独立，多了一点自信，也明白还有太多太多要学的东西和挑战等着我的下一个八年，和再下一个八年… …

这样的下午，我很快乐，对于现在的生活和我拥有的一切。

P.S. I hope someone’s feet don’t mind the exposure above.

 I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed
around as a drop-in for another 18 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
college 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 have an
unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My
biological mother later found out 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 someday go to
college. This was the start in my life.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively 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 how college was going to help me figure it
out. And here I was spending all of 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 5¢ deposits to
buy food with, and I would walk the 7 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 following 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 san 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 this calligraphy class, and personal 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 ten 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
in the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to
follow your heart even when they leave you off the well-worn path. And it has made all the difference in my life.

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 20. We worked hard, and
in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a
$2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our
finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned
30. 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. So at 30 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 had 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 of 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, 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.

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 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.
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 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.

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 doctor’s code for prepare to
die. It means to try to 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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, and overflowing with neat tools and great
notions.

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.” 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.