Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
Background
A year after his cancer diagnosis and a year before the iPhone existed, Steve Jobs stood before Stanford’s graduating class in jeans and sandals under his robe and told exactly three stories: one about connecting dots, one about love and loss, one about death. He never graduated from college; he called this the closest he ever got.
The speech has since been watched over a hundred million times. It borrowed its closing line from the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog — a farewell message printed beneath a photograph of a country road.
From the speech
On connecting the dots — the calligraphy class he wandered into after dropping out:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
On getting fired from the company he founded:
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. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
On death, a year after his diagnosis:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And the farewell, borrowed from the back cover of the Whole Earth Catalog:
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Go to the source
Watch the full speech →
Stanford’s official recording (15 minutes)
Read the full prepared text →
Stanford Report’s transcript