About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at seven thirty in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. 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. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure 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 all day. 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. 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 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 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:
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 as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way 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 others’ 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 fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. 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. 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 for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
From his earliest days, Steve had always been able to spin a tale. But nothing he ever said before resonated this way. The speech has been viewed at least 35 million times on YouTube. It didn’t go viral, in the way of a Web phenomenon of 2015—social networks weren’t as developed or extensive a decade ago. But it gradually became recognized as something truly exceptional, of great meaning to a world of people beyond the Stanford Stadium as well. Its popularity surprised him. “None of us expected it to take off like that,” says Katie Cotton, who headed up communications and PR for Apple at the time.
It was not a speech that would have resonated or gotten the same attention a few years earlier. But by the summer of 2005, Apple was back, and Steve’s reputation along with it. Revenues and profits were up, and the stock too was beginning to move in the right direction. All thoughts of the dark days, all memories of Spindler and Sculley and Amelio had been banished, at least for the public—Steve himself always kept those times in the back of his mind, as a reminder of what could happen if Apple didn’t stay sharp. Much of the public found something deeply admirable about what he had accomplished. Steve was no longer a wunderkind and he had put the has-been label to rest. Now he seemed to be a comeback hero, defying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage that “there are no second acts in American life.” The question was no longer whether Apple would survive; the question was, What would Apple do next? Indeed, the cover story I had written for Fortune a few weeks before the speech was titled “How Big Can Apple Get?”
For Jim Collins, Apple’s comeback is the starting point for considering the nature Steve’s greatness as a businessman. “We all get crushed or decked or knocked down. Everyone does. Sometimes you may not even see that it’s happened, but it happens to everyone,” says Collins, who besides writing several bestsellers in the last ten years has also turned himself into a world-class rock climber. “Whenever I find myself tired, whenever I’m thinking about whether I want to launch into another creative project, I always think of Steve in that period when he was in trouble. I’ve always drawn sustenance from that. That’s a touchstone for me, that willingness not to capitulate.”
Collins has specialized in the study of what makes great companies tick, and what marks the people who lead them. He sees something unique in Steve’s unorthodox business education. “I used to call him the Beethoven of business,” he says, “but that’s more true of when he was young. When Steve was twenty-two, you could consider him a genius with a thousand helpers. But he grew way beyond that. He’s not a success story, but a growth story. It’s truly remarkable to go from being a great artist to being a great company builder.”
After the scattered political and emotional frenzy of his first decade at Apple, and after his failure to deliver what he promised at NeXT, it was hard to imagine that Steve could ever be considered a great business leader. But by the summer of 2005, he had begun to seem just that. Clearly, Apple would have simply disappeared without him. Luck had played a big role in getting Steve back to Apple, but, says Collins, echoing Ed Catmull, “What separates people is the return on luck, what you do with it when you get it. What matters is how you play the hand you’re dealt.” He continues, “You don’t leave the game, until it’s not your choice. Steve Jobs had great luck at arriving at the birth of an industry. Then he had bad luck in getting booted out. But Steve played whatever hand he was dealt to the best of his ability. Sometimes you create the hand, by giving yourself challenges that will make you stronger, where you don’t even know what’s next. That’s the beauty of the story. Steve’s almost like the Tom Hanks character in Castaway—just keep breathing because you don’t know what the tide will bring in tomorrow.”
“The narrative that was created around Steve 1.0 has dominated,” says Collins. “That’s partly because the story of a man who matured slowly into a seasoned leader is less interesting. Learning how to have disposable cash flow, and how to pick the right people, and growing, and rounding off the sharp edges, and not merely acting strange—that’s not as interesting! But all that personality stuff is just the packaging, the window dressing. What’s the truth of your ambition? Do you have the humility to continually grow, to learn from your failures and get back up? Are you utterly relentless for your cause, ferocious for your cause? Can you channel your intensity and intelligence and energy and talents and gifts and ideas outward into something that is bigger and more impactful than you are? That’s what great leadership is about.”