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Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

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Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Stanford Business,

5 min read
5 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Steve Jobs shares three life and career lessons that life taught him.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

On a sunny day in May 2005, Apple and Pixar co-founder Steve Jobs addressed the graduating class of Stanford University. He shared three stories from his life that illustrated his guiding principles: Do what you love; indulge your curiosity; trust your intuition and pursue your passion. Jobs explained how the worst points in his life – dropping out of college, being ousted from Apple and developing cancer – served as doorways to a higher level of creativity and understanding. The speech provided an intimate glimpse into what motivated this successful, iconic man, and Jobs’s advice is timeless. getAbstract recommends this video especially to graduates at the beginning of their career and to anyone stuck midway.

Summary

Steve Jobs’s birth mother insisted that his adoptive parents be college graduates. In fact, Jobs’s adoptive father never graduated from high school, and his mother didn’t graduate from college. However, they promised to send Jobs to college to appease his birth mother. Some 17 years later, Jobs attended Reed College but felt uncomfortable with how much the tuition cost his working-class parents. He dropped out after only six months and then “dropped in” on classes that interested him, such as calligraphy. Later, when Jobs worked on the first Macintosh computer, he included the beautiful typefaces he studied ...

About the Speaker

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. He founded NeXT Inc. in 1985 and bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) in 1986. On October 5, 2011, Jobs died following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

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