The Steve Jobs MBA Unit 114: Stay hungry, stay foolish

22 Jun 2011


When Steve Jobs took his place behind a lectern at Stanford University on June 12, 2005 to give the commencement address, he offered a confession: "Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation." The dropout from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, then told the graduates sitting in front of him three stories.

The first was about his own university experience. "After six months, I couldn't see the value in it...The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting." Jobs took a course in calligraphy instead and "found it fascinating". "None of this had even a hope of any practical 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 he had never dropped out, he said, he would have never dropped in on a calligraphy class, and computers "might not have the wonderful typography that they do". "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect 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. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference."

Jobs's second story was about being fired from Apple. "The best thing that could ever have happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." In that time Jobs built up NeXT and

Pixar and also met his wife.

The final story was about death. He recounted the story of the


When Jobs was the same age as his Stanford audience, he used to read the Whole Earth Catalog. His final thought was taken from that magazine's final issue. He described the cover photo, of an early-morning road, "the kind you might find yourself hitch-hiking on if you were so adventurous". He said he had always wished the caption for himself, and he wished it now for the graduates: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Thank you all very much."

More from the Steve Jobs MBA

Unit 101: Future thinking

Unit 102: People pay more if it's worth it

Unit 103: Connect your people

Unit 104: Master the entire business

Unit 105: Build from the bottom up

Unit 106: Interpret, don't impersonate

Unit 107: It's all about design

Unit 108: Dazzle your audience

Unit 109: Steve Jobs: in his own words

Unit 110: Challenge the expectations of others

Unit 111: Be your own competition

Unit 112: Reboot, reboot, reboot

Unit 113: The big reveal is the best advertising