Er wordt me met enige regelmaat gevraagd wie mij inspireert. Enigszins clichématig antwoord ik dan: Steve Jobs. Het is een antwoord dat je waarschijnlijk van veel zelfbenoemde nerds zult krijgen, maar lang niet altijd om dezelfde redenen. Vaak gaat het erom dat hij de grondlegger is van het meest succesvolle en waardevolle merk ter wereld, Apple, maar voor mij gaat het om zijn levensfilosofie. Ik ben geen Steve Jobs, verre van zelfs, maar ik herken mezelf in zijn kijk op de wereld en de keuzes die hij in zijn leven heeft gemaakt.

In 2005 gaf Steve Jobs de Commencement Address op Stanford. Het is de toespraak waarmee afgestudeerden traditioneel de wereld worden ingestuurd, en het is voor mij de meest indrukwekkende toespraak die ik ooit heb gehoord. Tijdens deze speech vertelt hij drie verhalen over zijn leven.

Connecting the dots

Net als Steve ben ik gestopt met de universiteit. Toen ik van de middelbare school af kwam koos ik voor informatiekunde aan de Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam, maar thuisvoelen deed ik me er nooit. Het was een afstandelijke legbatterij waar niemand je naam kende, een studentenfabriek. Ik kon daar niks mee, ik miste sfeer en persoonlijkheid. Bovendien ging het leren voornamelijk uit werkelijk oersaaie boeken, waar ik toch meer hands-on ben aangelegd. Ik werd er uiteindelijk doodongelukkig, tot het punt dat ik besloot dat dat het niet waard was. Ik stopte, en ging er maar vanuit dat het allemaal goed zou komen. Dat was geen makkelijke beslissing, want ik proefde de teleurstelling in mijn omgeving, maar het was nodig voor mezelf.

Niet veel later werd ik door een vriend meegenomen naar de eindpresentaties van zijn studie Interactieve Media aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Hij verzekerde me dat ik het leuk zou vinden en hij had gelijk. Er heerste een gemoedelijke, vriendelijke sfeer waarbij docenten en studenten vriendschappelijk met elkaar omgingen en het ene na het andere prachtige project voorbij kwam. Een wereld van verschil met de universiteit, en dus schreef ik me in.

Ik vloog door de studie heen, had het enorm naar mijn zin en kwam uiteindelijk voor mijn stage bij Agency.com terecht, op dat moment een van de grootste digitale bureaus ter wereld. Ik werkte aan een project voor T-Mobile, waarvoor we later 3 SPIN-award nominaties zou krijgen, en tekende niet veel later mijn eerste contract. Agency.com fuseerde vervolgens met TBWA en zo zat ik ineens bij een van de grootste marketingbureaus ter wereld.

Wat er was gebeurd als ik op de universiteit was gebleven weet ik natuurlijk niet, maar terugkijkend voelt het nog steeds als een belangrijke en goede beslissing. En het is het wijze les: durf te vertrouwen op jezelf, het komt goed.

Love and loss

Zowel een kracht als een zwakte van mezelf is dat ik ergens mijn hart en ziel instop, en ook nog eens erg perfectionistisch ben. Ik voel me snel verantwoordelijk en zoek altijd naar de ruimte om mijn vak te kunnen uitoefenen en van waarde te zijn. Ik ben blij en trots dat ik zo ben, maar heb ook gemerkt dat niet iedereen zo in elkaar steekt. Soms gaat het niet over resultaat maar over politiek en ego, en daar ga ik erg slecht op.

Ik heb in mijn carrière in loondienst mensen meegemaakt die glashard logen en me zonder blikken of blozen voor de bus duwden om hun eigen hachje te redden. Het heeft me geforceerd om dingen waar ik met ziel en zaligheid aan gewerkt had op te geven, en dat doet pijn, helemaal als je de resultaten die je zo zorgvuldig hebt opgebouwd ziet instorten. Maar het is ook wederom een wijze les: niet iedereen is hetzelfde. Sommige mensen werken niet uit passie en resultaat, maar voor autoriteit en geld.

Ik geloof in betrokkenheid en voelen waar je mee bezig bent omdat ik denk dat dat het beste resultaat oplevert, maar ben me ook bewust dat het je kwetsbaar maakt. Het is veel makkelijker als het je niks kan schelen en je om 5 uur zonder zorgen naar huis gaat. Toch zou ik iedereen aanraden zijn hart te volgen. Geluk is veel waardevoller dan geld. Als ZZP’er verdien ik lang niet meer wat ik deed, maar alles is eerlijk, oprecht en uit liefde, en dat is van onschatbare waarde.

Death

Ik heb niet zoals Steve Jobs een bijna-dood ervaring gehad, maar de woorden uit zijn speech raakten me wel:

“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Het is een soort mantra geworden om niet te verzanden in de dagelijkse sleur en vooral te blijven doen waar mijn hart ligt. Het is een zeer waardevolle tool gebleken om belangrijke beslissingen mee te maken, en die maak ik dan ook. Er is geen enkele reden om lang ongelukkig te zijn. Ik kan het iedereen aanraden.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

De kern van deze speech zit hem in het moedig genoeg zijn om je hart en intuïtie te volgen, om datgene te doen wat je drijft en om je niet te laten limiteren door anderen. Hij sluit af met de tekst “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”. Het zijn woorden die ik altijd ter harte heb genomen en wellicht nog wel eens op mijn arm terecht komen als ik niet meer zo bang ben voor naalden. Maar of ze er nou staan of niet, ik zal altijd hongerig blijven, en op zijn tijd een beetje dwaas.

De hele speech van Steve Jobs en het transcript vind je hieronder. Kijk en geniet.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. 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.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

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. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

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 others’ 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.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.