English · Chapter 14
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"How to Live Before You Die" is the title given in the Grade 11 textbook to the commencement address Steve Jobs delivered to the graduating class of Stanford University on 12 June 2005. Jobs (1955 to 2011) was the co-founder of Apple, the founder of NeXT, and the head of Pixar Animation Studios. He never completed a university degree himself, which he admits with humour at the start of the speech. The address is short, plain in language and organised around three personal stories. It is studied as a piece of persuasive speaking, and as a reflection on how to choose work, how to respond to failure, and how the awareness of death can guide a life.
Jobs opens by telling the graduates that he is honoured to be with them, and that standing at a graduation is the closest he has ever come to one, since he dropped out of college. He promises to tell just three stories from his life, nothing more.
The first story is about connecting the dots. Jobs was adopted at birth by working class parents who promised his biological mother that he would go to college. He enrolled at Reed College, but after six months he could see no value in it and felt guilty about spending his parents' savings, so he dropped out. He stayed on campus as a drop-in, sleeping on friends' floors, returning bottles for food money and walking across town every Sunday for a free meal at the Hare Krishna temple. Because he was no longer bound to a degree, he followed his curiosity into a calligraphy course, learning about serif and sans serif typefaces and about the spacing between letters. At the time none of this had any practical use. Ten years later, when the first Macintosh was designed, all of it came back, and the Macintosh became the first computer with beautiful typography, a feature that personal computers have carried ever since. The lesson is that you cannot connect the dots looking forward, only looking backward, so you have to trust that the dots will connect somehow and follow your heart even when it leads off the well worn path.
The second story is about love and loss. Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in a garage when Jobs was twenty, and in ten years it grew into a company with over four thousand employees. Then, at thirty, he was fired from the company he had founded, after a falling out with the board over the direction of the business. He felt he had let down the earlier generation of entrepreneurs and even thought of leaving Silicon Valley. What saved him was realising that he still loved what he did. Freed from the weight of success, he entered one of the most creative periods of his life. He founded NeXT and Pixar, and Pixar went on to make Toy Story, the first computer animated feature film. Apple later bought NeXT, and he returned to Apple, bringing NeXT's technology with him. He also met his wife in these years. His conclusion is that getting fired was the best thing that could have happened to him, that work fills a large part of life, and that the only way to be satisfied is to do work you believe is great, which means doing what you love. If you have not found it yet, keep looking and do not settle.