You’ve got to find what you love, Steve Job’s Standford speech

Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs recently did a speech at Stanford University’s graduating ceremony.

It was an amazing, inspiring speech, even if you don’t like Apple or Jobs it’s a must see. I’ve used Apple computers since 1985 and sold Macs for 7 years for pay, many more years for free.

If you have kids, show your kids this. Steve was really personal and authentic here, no “reality distortion field” here.

Here’s the video of the speech. Thanks to Shawn King at Your Mac Life for the tip.

He’s done pretty well for a college dropout who had to collect empty pop bottles to buy food in college. There’s been a lot of negative press lately about America around the world, i.e., torture camps in Cuba and Iraq, lying to the country in order to go to war and getting away with it, and being absolutely incompetent militarily and politically about conducting the occupation in Iraq (no matter what side of the fence you’re on, it’s pretty hard to disagree with the last part) and while a lot of it is called for, it’s important to remember in the midst of all of this one fact.

How many countries in the world could you name where someone with a working class background who dropped out of college could be as successful as Steve is both financially (billionaire +) and in his continual phenomenal impact in the world of technology and beyond?

If it weren’t for Apple, PC users would still be using DOS. Even Microsoft’s chief blogger Robert Scoble admits in the comment section of this post on his blog

Is OSX ahead? Yes. But Apple has always been ahead.

Here are some quotes from the speech.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your 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. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

 

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

 

Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

A great speech, don’t let the dream crushers kill your dreams. He followed his heart and did pretty damn well. The world would be a much better place with more people who do what they loved instead of “just settling”.