3 Lessons from Steve Jobs (Key Points from Stanford '05 Speech)

This video is a bit different from what I usually do as first of all, it's 4 rather than 3 - I didn't want to cut it any shorter than this minutes otherwise you lose some of the takeaways. I usually focus on TED Talks as they always have the best lessons but Steve Job's Commencement Speech at Stanford is something I've watched many times as it has great lessons.

Here it is, edited down to 5 minutes from the original 15 minutes - focusing on his 3 key lessons:

1) You can only connect the dots looking backwards
Steve dropped out of college, unsure of what he was going to do. He took a calligraphy course at Reed college as it was simply something he was interested in. At the time he never thought it would be useful, but ended up helping him design fonts and typefaces into the wildly popular Macintosh.
The lesson is that you have to have faith in what you are doing. If there is something you are drawn to and deeply interested in, just trust that it will be useful in the future, even if not now. It will all make sense once you look back on your life and see how you got where you are, but you can't guess how it's going to turn out. Most people give up on things when they don't see where it will take them right away. Have more faith and do what you love.

2) Love and Loss
Steve built up apple with Wozniak into a billion dollar business because it was something he loved. Then when he was 30, he was fired. While devastated, this freed him up to create Pixar and NeXt. He was sure this would not have happened if he wasn't fired. The key was that he still loved what he did so he was able to start back up from scratch and produce something even better than before. Find what you love - keep looking and don't settle. When you find what you love you'll be able to do your greatest work, and it will get better and better

3) Death
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." Steve explains how he had pancreatic cancer, expecting to die. Luckily (at the time) it turned out the cancerous tumor was a rare form that was treatable by surgery. He always used the idea of death as a motivator to push through difficulties and ignore other's opinions, but after having experienced it first hand he is much more confident in the concept.
You're going to die anyways, so have the courage to follow your heart and intuition - fear of embarassment and what others think of you is hardly important.

He signs off with the famous "Stay hungry, Stay foolish"



Full 15 minute speech here:

Original Description:
"Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself -- at the university's 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.

Transcript of Steve Jobs' address:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news..."