Prepared text of the Commencement Address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on 12th June 2005:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six 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.

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 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 seven 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. This approach has never let me down, 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 ten 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 worlds 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 until you find it. 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 ten 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 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 1960s, 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.

Thank you all very much.

~ Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

[With thanks to Gloria Lee at The Nonduality Highlights for alerting me to this]

If truth and beauty, at the end of the day, are all we need to know, to coin John Keats’ immortal words, how exactly am I to do that when producing a film? On the eve of making my next short video, even with everything in place – actor, location, script, even a rough idea of the editing format afterwards – how am I to capture that metaphysical, even spiritual, quality that I am so desperate to represent, whilst maintaining my artistic integrity and without, more importantly, the whole exercise turning into something cheesy and sentimental.

Again, the only way to learn is to draw inspiration from the masters of their craft so I have been working my way through the complete films of Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as reading Andrei Tarkovsky: Sculpting in Time, in which the director himself talks about his art.

Not having come from an artistic background – my life having been spent predominantly in the literary and philosophical worlds – I now shamefully appreciate what wealth of wisdom I have been missing all these years. Maybe I am lost in some sort of aesthetic honeymoon period, but it seems to me that the way of the visual artist can reach depths of understanding and insight with which left-brain thinking can perhaps barely empathise.

For example, here is Tarkovsky talking about ‘Art – a yearning for the ideal’:

‘Before going on to the particular problems of the nature of cinematic art, I feel it is important to define my understanding of the ultimate aim of art as such. Why does art exist? Who needs it? Indeed, does anybody need it? These are questions asked not only by the poet, but also by anyone who appreciates art – or, in that current expression all too sympathetic of the twentieth-century relationship between art and its audience – the "consumer" …

‘In any case it is perfectly clear that the goal of all art – unless of course it is aimed at the "consumer", like a saleable commodity – is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question…

‘In a very real sense every individual experiences this process for himself as he comes to know life, himself, his aims. Of course, each person uses the sum of knowledge accumulated by humanity but all the same the experience of ethical, moral self-knowledge is the only aim in life for each person, and subjectively, it is experienced each time as something new. Again and again man correlates himself with the world, racked with longing to acquire, and become one with, the ideal which lies outside himself, which he apprehends as some kind of intuitively sensed first principle. The unattainability of that becoming one, the inadequacy of his own "I", is the perpetual source of man’s dissatisfaction and pain.

‘And so art, like science, is a means of assimilating the world, an instrument for knowing it in the course of man’s journey towards what is called “absolute truth”…

‘Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake. What purports to be art begins to look like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in artistic creation the personality does not assert itself, it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle.’
(pp. 36–8)

Rather than watching his films in chronological order, my first taste of Tarkovsky’s genius was Stalker [Сталкер] (1979), loosely based on the novel, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who also wrote the screenplay for the film.

On the surface, the plot is fairly straightforward: a meteorite has decimated a provincial Russian town twenty years previously, the area of which is now dubbed The Zone. There is an inner chamber within The Zone called The Room, which once entered will fulfil one’s deepest desire. The Zone is fiercely guarded by the local army; however, the desperate and suffering make the journey to The Zone, despite the fact that many have disappeared in their attempts.

A successful Writer (looking for inspiration?) and a Scientist (looking for scientific explanations?) enlist the help of an experienced Stalker or guide to help them reach The Room in order to realise their innermost dreams. Paradoxically, on the threshold of entering The Room, their anxiety over the manifestation of their most precious prayers leads them to a spiritual crisis and to question the very nature of their existence. They both falter, crippled with feelings of worthlessness and self-doubt.

Interestingly, it is Stalker who is forever wrestling with his spiritual conscience throughout their journey, never even wanting to venture into The Room himself to actualise his worldly ambitions (he no longer has any). In a poignantly solitary moment, Stalker laments the state of his own life, pondering upon the fact that there has to be something far greater and noble way beyond the phenomenal world for everything to make any sense. At this point in the film, Tarkovsky makes Stalker recite a poem, written by his father, Arseniy Tarkovsky, and added to the screenplay:

Now summer is gone
And might never have been.
In the sunshine it's warm.
But there has to be more.

It all came to pass,
All fell into my hands
Like a five-petalled leaf,
But there has to be more.

Nothing evil was lost,
Nothing good was in vain,
All ablaze with clear light
But there has to be more.

Life gathered me up
Safe under its wing,
My luck always held,
But there has to be more.

Not a leaf was burnt up
Not a twig ever snapped...
Clean as glass is the day,
But there has to be more.

Arseniy Tarkovsky

And what is ‘more’? Back at the café from whence they all originally departed, the arrival of Stalker’s wife confounds the Writer and Scientist, for here is a woman who has suffered interminably for her husband, bearing him a disabled child, and yet who still continues to love him with the same selfless devotion of her youth. It is her unconditional love and human dignity that triumph in a world polluted by greed, secularism and self-interest, a world in which the Writer and the Scientist are both victims and fall foul.

Tarkovsky again:

‘I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols. In the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element, which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor, which determines the meaning of a person’s life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.'
(p.200)

I have to say, watching Stalker has made all films I have seen in the past pale into complete insignificance. I cannot think of any director who manages to encompass such a profound spiritual vision into his work, where in fact the spiritual vision IS his work. Indeed, it is said that when Tarkovsky moved to the West, he read the complete works of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, which greatly influenced his cinematic art.

The film is beautifully shot, with chromatic shifts - monochrome, sepia and colour sequences - symbolic of both the geographical locations of the outside world and The Zone, as well as the conscious and subconscious states of mind of the characters. In addition, with the haunting soundtrack, composed by Eduard Artemyev using a synthesizer together with traditional Russian instruments, including the flute and tar (iranian lute), the overall aesthetic effect is utterly devastating.

In the final scene, Monkey, the daughter, sits quietly at a table, surrounded by glasses. In a mesmerising sequence, by an act of telekinesis, she moves the glasses along the table, one of which falls off and breaks. A train then passes by, rattling the entire house in its wake. What does it mean? Individual divinity? Faith triumphing over suffering? Who knows? But it is a fitting end to an exquisite film.