Why Steve Jobs's Speech Is The Most Inspiring Speech Of All Time

For many people, we just know Steve Jobs as the founder of Apple Inc. A visionary leader who revolutionised technology and had an eccentric personality of always wearing black turtle neck shirts.

I recently came across a speech Steve Jobs gave at a college graduation at Standford University in 2005.

Here are his words of wisdom:

1. Connect the dots

He shared about how he dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months.

All of his working-class parent's savings were being spent on his college tuition. He couldn’t see the value at that point in time and he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life.

For Jobs he didn’t see how college was going to help him figure out what to do with his life. Hence, Jobs quit college and trusted that it would all work out one day. According to Jobs, it was a pretty scary decision but looking back it was one of the best decisions he had ever made.

The minute he dropped out of classes that didn’t interest him, he had time to look into courses that did interest him.

Much of what Jobs stumbled into was by following his curiosity and intuition which became priceless later on. He joined a calligraphy class and learned about what makes typography great. Although none of it had any practical real life application in his life at that time, little did he know that 10 years later when he and his team were designing the first MacIntosh computer it all came back to him and he incorporated it into the Mac. Had he not dropped out of college and joined the typography class, the Mac would never had typography in its font.

It was impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but it was very clear looking backwards later.

The lesson of his story: You cannot connect the dots looking forward, only when you look backwards. You have to trust that the dots (gits, karma, destiny) will somehow connect in your future. - Steve Jobs.

Believing that the dots will somehow connect in the future will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the worn path, and that will make all the difference.

2. Love & loss

Jobs was fortunate to find what he loved doing in life early on. He started Apple with his friend Woz in his parent's garage. They worked hard and in just 10 years grew from a 2 person working off Jobs's garage to a $2 billion dollar company.

He then got fired at age 30.

How could he get fired from his own company? Well, he hired someone that he thought had a good vision for the future but they later had a falling out and the board sided with the guy he hired. That was hard and defeating for Jobs.

He then decided to start over

• He started a company Next and another company Pixar, (now the most successful animation studio).
• He met an amazing woman who became his wife.

In a turn of events:

• Apple bought Next and he was hired back into his former company.
• He and his wife started a beautiful family.

The lesson of the story: Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. You have to keep going. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. The only way to be satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. It's just that simple.

If you haven't found it yet, keep going, don’t give up, never settle.

3. Death

When he was 17 he read this quote and took it to heart:

If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you most certainly will be right.

It made an impression on him. This made him reconsider a lot of decisions in his life. Would he want to live his last day doing this he asked himself, and if the answer was “no”, he knew he needed to change something.

Remembering that he will be dead soon has been an essential tool for making big choices in his life. Almost everything (external expectations, pride, fear of embarrassment or failure) just falls away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

No one wants to die, yet death is the destination we all share.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone’s life.

In Steve Jobs's own words, don’t be trapped by living the results of other people’s thinking. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

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