When Steve Jobs was 41 years old, he gave a speech at Palo Alto High School in California. He offered some of his life wisdom to the graduating class.
He started out by warning the students to remember that the most important things in life are not goal-oriented or materialistic. They are the artistic things, the magical things, the mystical things. He invited them to imagine where they intuitively saw themselves in a year. He encouraged them to nurture these feelings about what they could do with their lives. He suggested that a good way to remember is to look at the sky.
He said there will be opposition. People will confront them with reasons why they shouldn’t pursue these innate dreams. He also directed a comment to those who don’t have such dreams. He counseled those students to take the time necessary to recapture their dreams if they didn’t have them—before pursuing a path in life that their heart didn’t really want.
He said to be creative, and explained that being creative “equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.” He went on to give the example that he would share later in a commencement address at Stanford. When he was in collage, he took a calligraphy class. This class did not promise any future income, and some of his friends commented that he was wasting time taking such a class. But, years later, when he and his team at Apple Computer were creating the Macintosh computer, he applied what he had learned in that class and made sure that computer could have proportionally spaced fonts and a variety of fonts.
Steve concluded this story by encouraging the students to pursue experiences and to follow their heart, even if they didn’t know where this would lead in the future.
He warned the students to not be a career. He said that the idea that work is separate from life is false. He said that it is much better for one to be passionate about both their life and work so that they become one. “Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.”
Citing his own experience in becoming wealthy, he said that he reached the end of the rainbow, and it was not the reward. The reward he said is crossing the rainbow—it is the journey. If the end of the rainbow is reached, then one must go find another rainbow to cross.
Continuing the metaphor of a rainbow, he said that the ends of each person’s rainbow are birth and death. He said that both of these are experienced individually—by ourselves. He referred to birth as a miracle and death as a mystery. He said that knowing that he will die is important to him because it makes him want to make the most of his life while his arc is in the sky.
He closed his message by counseling the students to try to have few regrets. He said that mistakes are not regrets. If one’s intention was good, but they make a mistake, that can still be an enriching experience. Mistakes on the other hand are things that one wishes they did, but didn’t.
