Find what you love

20 years ago, Steve Jobs gave some good advice

Twenty years ago last month, Steve Jobs took the stage at Stanford University to deliver a 15-minute address to the class of 2005. He began:

I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And this is the closest I’ve ever 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.

There’s so much to like in this speech: from the way Jobs organized it and shared the organization with the audience right up front (again: “just three stories”), to the stories themselves and the clear takeaways from each one.

I’ve watched this speech multiple times and written about it more than once. I used to do a lot of ghostwriting, and I'd suggest clients read or listen to it.

Yet, I was intrigued to realize only in my latest go-round that at one point Jobs shares seven words of advice that really underpin everything else in the speech — and offer a key secret to his success.

It’s almost the meaning of life, in fact: “You’ve got to find what you love.”

“Commencement Bingo”

To mark the 20th anniversary of the speech, the Steve Jobs Archive, a project launched by Laurene Powell Jobs in 2022, shared a new, enhanced video of Jobs’s speech along with artifacts and stories.

Most interesting to me, I think, is the revelation that while Jobs was making history onstage that day, many of the graduates and others in attendance had a hard time focusing on what he was saying.

As the Archive puts it:

In the audience, many students had been too distracted to pay full attention. There were beach balls to bat away, drinks and fans to deploy against the sweltering heat, families to find in the crowd, and a game of “Commencement Bingo” to play.

Many graduates only recognized the impact of the speech later, when others asked.

“I don’t think we all realized how important his speech was until we left and found it, revisited it, and had others tell us how important it was,” Paola Fontein, who graduated that day and was one of the co-presidents of her class, said in an interview on the Archive.

It’s understandable: Imagine you’re graduating, probably out at a party or two late the night before, up early, sitting in the hot sun in a black graduation gown, emotional from goodbyes, and riled up at the adventures before you …

I might have had a hard time paying attention, too.

The three stories

But that’s why we’re fortunate that YouTube had made its debut about a year before.

Even if people didn’t notice as Jobs basically gave away the core difference between people who achieve success in life and those who don’t — at least in his estimation — we’re all able to go back years later and check it out again.

The “three stories” Jobs told that day went like this:

• Story 1: Jobs talked about how he dropped out of Reed College when he was young but stuck around to audit classes he found interesting, like calligraphy.

As a result, he said, because he knew about things like typography, Apple’s computers a decade later had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

Lesson: “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.”

• Story 2: Jobs told the story of how he co-founded Apple, hired an external CEO, and wound up fired:

“I was a very public failure. … But something slowly began to dawn on me: I still loved what I did. … And so I decided to start over. … I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”

Lesson: “You’ve got to find what you love—and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.”

• Story 3: “My third story is about death.”

Jobs talked about having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told that he had no more than six months to live — only to learn later that he had a rare cancer that could be treated with surgery.

Lesson: “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. … Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

“Very real for Steve”

Looking back at it now — and of course, I have the benefit of multiple viewings, plus nobody made me get up early and I’m not wearing a black robe in the hot sun — but that seven-word summary seems very apt; really the entire theme to the whole speech: “You’ve got to find what you love.”

“Part of its power is there’s so much in it. And I think that what you’re pulling out was very, very real for Steve,” Leslie Berlin, the foundering executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive, told me when we talked about this recently.

She continued:

We have a book called Make Something Wonderful, which is Steve in his own words. And the very first page of that book is a quote from him … He talks about how making something with a great deal of love is a way of showing humanity that you care.

And so I think that what you’re hitting on here … is his sense of how important it is to do what you love. … [T]hat’s how you give something back into the world. I think it’s a deep idea you’ve got there.

It’s a speech worth watching and hearing again — or for the first time if this is new for you. Here’s the full video, remastered in HD.

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7 other things worth mentioning

• Mystery surrounds the Jeffrey Epstein files after Attorney General Bondi claims there are ‘tens of thousands’ of videos. (Associated Press)

• Satellite images show Iran has built a new access road at its Fordow uranium enrichment site and moved in construction equipment that could be used to assess the damage done to the key underground nuclear facility by last month’s U.S. airstrike. Analysts said the excavator was likely preparing a staging area to send cameras or personnel down the holes made by American bombs to inspect the damage done to the underground facility. (WSJ)

• Iran-linked hackers have threatened to disclose more emails stolen from U.S. President Donald Trump's circle, after distributing a prior batch to the media ahead of the 2024 U.S. election. The hackers, who go by the pseudonym Robert, said they had roughly 100 gigabytes of emails from the accounts of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan, Trump adviser Roger Stone and porn star-turned-Trump antagonist Stormy Daniels. (Reuters)

• A buildup of unsold houses sitting on the market for weeks is becoming a new reality in once-booming housing areas across the Sun Belt. In Florida, houses now take a median 73 days to sell, up from 55 days two years ago and twice as long as in New Jersey and Virginia, according to Realtor.com data. “In the big picture it’s not horrible, but compared to what everyone was used to, it feels like molasses,” said Michael Lauer, a broker in Florida’s Tampa Bay area. (Bloomberg)

• The National Association of Realtors, which came to a landmark $418 million settlement last year over claims of a conspiracy to fix commissions, is facing another antitrust lawsuit — this time over who can control access to real estate listings. Mauricio Umansky, a reality television star and a co-founder of the global brokerage The Agency, sued the trade organization in federal court this week. (NYT)

• Ford workers told their CEO ‘none of the young people want to work here.’ So Jim Farley took a page out of the founder’s playbook. (Fortune)

• The Battle to Keep Consumers Means Smaller Packs of Cookies and Chips: PepsiCo, Campbell’s and others are shrinking packages with lower-price options to spur sales. (The Wall Street Journal)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Gulom Nazarov on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.