Transcripts

00:00 Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Nothing else. It is not a big thing. Only three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed on and off for about 18 more months before actually quitting. Why did I retire permanently? It all started before I was born. My birth mother was a young, single, college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She strongly wanted him to be adopted by college graduates, so everything was ready for him to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except when I was born they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. Then my parents, who were on a waiting list, received a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have a newborn boy; do they want it? ". They said, "Of course.". My birth mother later found out that my mother had not graduated from college and that my dad never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She changed parents. It seemed a few months later when my parents promised that one day I would go to college.

01:22 That was the beginning of my life. And 17 years later I entered college. However, I naively chose a school almost as expensive as Stanford, and all the savings of my working-class parents were spent on my college tuition. After six months, I didn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do in my life and didn't know how college was going to help me. Figure it out. And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire lives. So I decided to drop out of college and trust that everything would work out. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I have never taken. The moment I decided to withdraw, I stopped taking the classes that didn't interest me, and started attending those that seemed interesting to me. Not everything was rosy. I had nowhere to sleep in college, so I slept on the floor of my friends' dorm rooms, returned cans of Coke for 5 cents to buy food, and walked 7 miles across town to eat. One good meal a week at the Hare-krishna temple. I loved it.

02:33 Most of the things I came across along the way by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be invaluable later on. Let me give you an example: At that time Reed College offered probably the best calligraphy course in the country. All the posters on the campus, and the labels on all the drawers, were beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had retired and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take the calligraphy class and learn how to do it. I learned about serif and sans serif type, about varying the amount of space between different combinations of letters, about what great penmanship entails. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle, in a way that science cannot capture. And I found it fascinating.None of this had even the slightest hope of practical application in my life. But 10 years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all made sense. And we designed it all on the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I hadn't taken that specific course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows was copied from the Mac, most likely no personal computer would have it. If I hadn't retired, I would never have taken that calligraphy course, and personal computers wouldn't have that beautiful typography. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. However, it was very, very clear, looking back 10 years later.

04:10 I repeat, you cannot connect the dots looking forward; They can only be connected facing rearwards. Therefore, they must trust that the dots will connect somehow in their future. You have to trust something - your intuition, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This perspective has never failed me, and it has made all the difference in my life. My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I knew what I wanted to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20 years old. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple grew from just the two of us in a garage to a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. A year before turning 30, we had launched our greatest creation - the Macintosh. And then they fired me. How can you be fired from a company you created? As Apple was growing, 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 expectations for the future began to diverge and we eventually had an argument.

05:25 At that time the Board of Directors supported him. Therefore, at 30 years old I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult. Life disappeared, and it was devastating. I didn't really know what to do for a couple of months. I felt like I had let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs— that I had let go of the baton that had been passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for acting so badly. It was a public failure, and I even thought about leaving the valley . But slowly I began to understand something - I still liked what I did.

06:02 What had happened with Apple didn't change that at all. I was rejected, but I was still in love. And then I decided to start again. I didn't understand it at the time, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me. The weight of having been successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of everything. It allowed me to enter one of the most creative stages of my life. Over the next five years, I started a company called NeXT, another company called Pixar, and I fell in love with a wonderful woman who became my wife. Pixar went on to create the first computer-animated film, Toy Story, and is currently the most successful animation studio in the world. In a surprising 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. Plus, Laurene and I have created a wonderful family. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was a very bitter tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.Don't lose faith. I am convinced that the only thing that kept me going is that I loved what I did. They have to find what they love. And this is a reality both for their jobs and for their loves. Their jobs are going to fill a large part of their lives, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what they consider to be great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

07:42 If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't stop. And as for matters of the heart, you will know when you find it. And like any important relationship, it gets better with age. Therefore, keep searching until you find it. Don't stop. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like this: “If you live every day of your life as if it were your last, one day you will really be right.”. It made a big impression on me, and since then, for the last 33 For years, I look in the mirror every morning and ask myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I do what I'm about to do today?”. And when the answer is “No” for several days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I will soon die is the most important tool I have found to help me make the big decisions of my life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of shame or failure - all these things disappear before death, leaving only what is important. Remembering that they are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking they have something to lose. They are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Nobody wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven, do not want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destiny we all share. No one has ever escaped from it. And that's as it should be, because death is possibly the best invention of life. It is the agent of change of life.

09:32 Erase the old to make way for the new. Now the new is you, but someday. Soon, you will gradually become the old and be erased. Sorry for being so dramatic, but it's the honest truth. Their time is limited, so they should not waste it living other people's lives. Don't get caught up in dogma - that's living with the results of other people's thoughts. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voices. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, which somehow know what you want to become. Everything else is secondary. “. Stay hungry, stay crazy.”.