Steve Jobs Commencement Speech

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.

Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

Editor's Note: Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., and a successful and charismatic entrepreneur, inventor and designer.

You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

I never graduated from college.

It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.

Editor's Note: Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., and a successful and charismatic entrepreneur, inventor and designer.

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

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.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer.

My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.

In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University in California, Jobs offered his insight into how to lead a successful life.

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 rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

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 rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.

On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.

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 now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: