En juin 2005, Steve Jobs prononça un discours historique devant les étudiants de l’université de Stanford, en Californie. Dans ce qui résonne aujourd’hui comme un testament philosophique, il raconte son histoire personnelle, ses échecs et ses succès professionnels, et évoque la maladie et la mort. J’ai pris le parti de garder le texte dans sa version originale avec ses tournures orales, même si elles peuvent parfois paraître impromptues. Seulement quelques pages mais avec des mots forts et des idées claires…
YOU’VE GOT TO FIND WHAT YOU LOVE
This is a prepare text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve JOBS (1955-2011), CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 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 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 6 months, but I stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So, 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 I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parent, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of a 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 6 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 I here 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 one the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic, I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friend’s room, I returned coke bottles for 5c deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hara 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 an 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 beautiful hand calligraphed. Because I 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 typerfaces, about varying the amount of space between different 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 pratical 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 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 conect 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 early in life. Moz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had gromw from just the of us in a garage into $2 billions company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I just had turn 30. And then I got fired. How can you get firedfrom a company you started ? Well, as Applegrom we hired someone who I thought very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But when our visions of the futur began to diverge and eventualy we had a falling out. When we did, our boards of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adultlife was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t now 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 no changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And 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 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 felt in love with an amazing woman who would become my life. Pixar went on to create the words first computer animated feature firm, Toy Storiy, 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 wonder fulfamily together.
I’m pretty sure non of this would be 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 to find what you love. And that is true for you work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a largepart 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 seetle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you found it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets 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 it was your last, someday you’ll be rignt.” 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 that 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 awayin the face of death, leaving only what 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 notto follllow your heart.
About a year ago I was dignosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t ever know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that it incurable, and that I should expect to live three to six months. My doctor advised me to go to home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’de have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to makesure 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 every day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck as endoscope down my threat, through my stomac and into my intestines, put a needle into my 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 rareform of pancreatic cancer that is curable whith a 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 living through it, I can now say this is you with a bit more certainly 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 at it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make 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 other’s 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 follow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menio Park, and he brought it to the life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with next tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then it had run its course, they put a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. One of the back cover of their final issue was a phograph 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 myself. And now, as you graduate to begin a new, I wish that for you.
Stay hungry, Stay Foolish.