Steve Jobs on Connecting the Dots: Three life stories

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Nothing major, just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of red college after the first six months, but then kept popping back for another 18 months or so before finally dropping out. So why did I drop out? It all started before I was born. My birth mother was a young, unmarried 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 going to be set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

But when I was born, at the last minute, they decided they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on the waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, we have a boy we didn't expect. Do you want him? They said, of course. My birth mother later found out that my mother never graduated from college and my father never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the adoption papers. She relented only a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. That was the beginning of my life. And 17 years later, I went to college.

But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford. And all of my working class parents' savings were spent on my college education. After six months, I didn'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 so I spent the money my parents had saved their entire lives. I decided to drop out and believe 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. The minute I dropped out, I could stop going to classes that didn't interest me and start going to ones that I found much more interesting.

It wasn't so romantic. I didn't have a room to live in, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for five cents to buy food. And I walked seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hari Krishna temple. I loved it, and much of what I stumbled upon by following my curiosity and intuition later proved invaluable. Let me give you an example. At the time, Reed Colge offered perhaps the best calligraphy class in the country. All over campus, every poster, every label on every crate was beautifully hand-painted. Because I had dropped out and wasn't required to take the regular classes, I decided to take the calligraphy class to learn how.

I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about the appropriate spacing between different combinations of Bob, about what makes great topography great. It was historically beautiful, artistically subtle in a way that academics can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this ever really had any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came in handy, and we incorporated my knowledge into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful topography. If I had never dropped in on that one course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple fonts or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows simply copied the Mac, they probably wouldn't have been on any personal computer.

If I had never quit, I would never have dropped in on those calligraphy assignments. And personal computers might not have had the beautiful topography they do. Of course, it would have been impossible to connect the dots when I was in college, but it all made sense looking back ten years. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking back. So you have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust something, your intuition, destiny, life's karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect in the future will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads off the beaten path and changes everything. My second story is about love and sweat.

I was lucky. I found what I loved to do at an early age. W.H.O. and I started building Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and within 10 years, Apple had grown from the two of us in a garage into a $2 million company with over 4,000 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 founded? Well, 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, everything went well. But then our visions for the future started to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When that happened, our managers sided with him, and so, at 30, I was pushed aside, and very proud of myself.

When that happened, our managers sided with him, and so, at 30, I was pushed aside, and very publicly pushed aside. What had been the purpose of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. For months, I really didn't know what to do. I felt like I was letting down the previous generation of entrepreneurs, like I'd dropped the baton that had been passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. It was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But slowly, it began to dawn on me. I still loved what I was doing. Things at Apple weren't changed by that one incident. I'd been rejected, but I was still in love, 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 weight of success gave way to being a beginner again, less sure of everything. This allowed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. Over the next five years, I founded a company called Next, another company called Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who became my wife. Pixar created 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, and I returned to Apple. And the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And we have a wonderful Slurren family. I'm almost certain none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.

It tasted terrible, but I think the patience was worth it. Sometimes life is going to hit you over the head with a brick, don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was loving what I did. You need to find what you love. This applies to work and your lovers. Your work will fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly fulfilled 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 despair. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know it when you find it. And like any great relationship, it only gets better with age. So keep looking, don't despair.

My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like this. If you live each day as if it were your last, one day you'll definitely be right. It made an impression on me. Since then, for the past 33 years, I've 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'm about to do today? And whenever the answer was no, for many days in a row, I knew I had to change something. Reminding myself that I'm going to die. I knew I had to change something. Reminding myself that I'm going to die soon is the most important tool I've ever had in helping me make big choices in life. Almost everything, all current expectations, all pride, all fear of difficulty or failure, these things simply disappear in the face of death, leaving only what's truly important.

Reminding yourself that you're going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You're already naked. There's no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven aren't willing to die to do so. And yet, death is a goal we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that's the way it should be, because death is quite likely the single best invention of life. It is life's agent of change. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too far away, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's absolutely true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't fall into the Fogma trap. Don't live your life the way other people think you should. Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your own inner voice. Importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Somehow, they already know who you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. Stay hungry, stay foolish.