8 ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Lessons for the Hungry and Foolish
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and
Pixar Animation Studios, began his com-
mencement address at Stanford University by
admitting he was a college dropout.
Jobs not only confessed that he dropped
out of Reed College after just six months, but
added that he doesn’t regret it. In fact, when
he looks back on his diverse but connected
experiences (which explain how he got where
he is now), Jobs sees leaving school as “one
of the best decisions” he ever made. Doing
so enabled him to stop spending his adoptive
parents’ carefully saved money on education
at a time when he had no idea how he might
use that education, and allowed him to infor-
mally sit in on courses that interested him
instead of enrolling in required courses that
bored him.
One of the courses that interested Jobs
was calligraphy. Learning how to create beau-
tiful letters didn’t seem like a very practical
skill at the time, but ten years later, when he
was developing the first Macintosh computer,
Jobs drew on that calligraphy experience to
incorporate multiple typefaces and proportion-
ally spaced fonts as two of the Mac’s most dis-
tinctive features. His competitor, Microsoft,
was then quick to add those elements to its
Windows operating system.
As Jobs reflected in his Stanford speech, “If
I had never dropped out, I would have never
dropped in on this calligraphy class, and per-
sonal computers might not have the wonder-
ful typography that they do.” The life lesson
he extracts from this experience is that individ-
uals must be willing to trust their gut instincts
when they make choices, and believe that
those choices (or “dots”) will somehow con-
nect to their future.
A second experience that Jobs shared with
Stanford grads that day was that after building
Apple into a $2 billion enterprise in just ten
years, he was fired by the company’s board of
directors. While he was understandably dev-astated at the time, Jobs now calls this “the
best thing that could ever have happened to
me” because it “freed me to enter one of the
most creative periods of my life.” Within five
years Jobs started both the NeXT company
and Pixar Animation Studios. Apple pur-
chased NeXT, and Jobs returned to the com-
pany that had fired him. He now oversees
what he calls Apple’s current renaissance,
based on the NeXT technology.
Jobs calls this a “love and loss” life lesson;
he continued to do the things he loved after
he lost his job, and that passion enabled him
to reach a new pinnacle in his career. Jobs’
advice to grads is also appropriate for aspiring
entrepreneurs. He said that “work is going to
fill a large part of your life, and the only way to
be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is
great work. And the only way to do great
work is to love what you do. If you haven’t
found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
The third life lesson Jobs spoke about that
day is what he calls a death lesson. In 2004
he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and
told he had three to six months to live. Then
the doctors discovered that his tumor was
actually a rare form of the disease that is cur-
able by surgery. Now that he is cancer free,
Jobs wants everyone to “have the courage to
follow your heart and intuition. Our time on
earth,” he reminds us, “is limited.”
In his closing remarks, Jobs reminisced
about The Whole Earth Catalog, a publication
from the 1960s and 1970s, which he
described as a kind of “Google in paperback.”
The catalog’s farewell advice, printed on the
back cover of the final issue, was “Stay
Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Jobs says this is
something he has always wished for himself,
and something he would wish for new college
graduates.
It’s a good motto for entrepreneurs, too.
SOURCE: Jobs’ commencement address was reprinted in
Fortune, September 5, 2005: 31–32.STREET STORY 1.