Connecting The Dots

Below is a great speech from Steve Jobs (Apple Computer) when he spoke at the 2005 Stanford University graduation ceremony.

As the new year begins, what are your plans and heart's desires?
We cannot connect the dots looking forward, we can only connect them looking backwards. Yet by not looking and moving forward, we deny ourselves the opportunities to create the dots that will eventually connect to show us the story of our life.

How then can we move forward? Perhaps we can follow our hearts.
Have a great 2008 !

(The key points of the speech are below the video clip)


The three stories:

1. Connecting the Dots
You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.

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.

Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path and that will make all the difference.

2. Love and Lost
Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

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 and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you will know when you find it.

3. Death
If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you will most certainly be right.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I have ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Because almost everything, all external expectations, or pride, or 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 that you have got something to lose. You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart.

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.


Stay hungry, stay foolish.