Major events in life
In the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address,
Steve Jobs, who was CEO of Apple and Pixar Animation, delivered a motivational
speech to graduate students based upon three main events in his life. He starts
by mentioning how the future was shaped for him; he then moves on telling about
his successes and failures and lastly, he makes reference to his living
philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to summarize those three events.
Steve Jobs begins the speech by reflecting on
his college education and the later drop-out. He starts connecting the dots
when he looked backwards and he analyses that if he had not dropped out, he
would not have been able to take that superb calligraphy class, which allowed
him to design his Macintosh graphical user interface. With this story, Jobs
encourages his audience to trust in whatever they believe in, in order to gain
confidence and follow their hearts. He reassures that by looking backwards you
will be able to see how the dots connect, but first you have to believe and
pursue your dreams.
In the second part of the speech, Jobs tells
a story that he entitled “Love and Loss”. This successful CEO accounts for his
early beginnings; he describes how much he has grown from setting up his first
business in the garage to a company with thousands employees. Though, he
discloses his unexpected and economical failures in a very humble way, he takes
this experience to motivate graduates to take failures as an opportunity to
start again. He expresses that if you love and feel passionate for what you do,
you will count with the necessary strength to begin and succeed again.
Approaching the final part
of his discourse, Jobs reminds students of the ephemeral condition of life. To
depict this, he tells about his sudden diagnosis of pancreas cancer, doctors
told him he had 3 to 6 months ahead and that it was incurable. Fortunately, he
went through surgery and he was saved. But this made him realize about his
limited time and he faces students with the true fact that we will all be dead
soon, so he urges them not to get trapped by dogma, not to live other
people’s lives but to follow their inner voice, “to have the courage to follow
your heart and intuition, somehow they know what you truly want” (Stanford, 2005).
To wrap-up this talk, Steve Jobs, one of the
most successful figures of the 21st century, used personal anecdotes
to make the audience reflect on their opportunities and decisions and he ended
the speech by accounting for his living philosophy. Jobs makes use of this
quotation “Stay hungry, stay foolish” (Stanford, 2005) to urge graduate
students to find their passion and to keep looking for more and better things
in their lives.
References
Jobs,
S. (2005). Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. Stanford University.
Retrieved from ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
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