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"HOW TO LIVE BEFORE YOU DIE" - Steve Jobs

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At his Stanford University commencement speech on June 2005, Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple and Pixar, urges to pursue dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself. The foremost aim of Steve Jobs’ speech How to Live before you Die is to motivate audience’s members to never cease exploring the full extent of their lives’ potential.

Jobs though his speech is able to establish a strong emotional contact with the audience by proving himself a humble, easy-going and humorous individual: “Truth be told, I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.”  By telling three stories from his life Steve is urging people to pursue their dreams and trust their intuition.

In the first part of his speech, Jobs told the story of how his life’s experiences started to make sense in the end, even though that when he was young, Jobs was often unable to find much of a meaning to these experiences. Hence, Jobs’ ‘connecting the dots’ allegory, which made the line of his argumentation, in this respect, much more illustrative. 

Steve always followed his intuition. He never graduated from the university. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life and didn’t think that college would help him figure it out. He dropped out of Reed College just after 6 months. By dropping out he could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest him and join the ones that looked interesting. For example, he took calligraphy (decorative handwriting or handwritten lettering) class to learn about typefaces, about what makes great typography great. 10 years later when designing the first Macintosh computer he used his knowledge and skills to design the first computer with beautiful typography. Much of what he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition (instinct/insight) turned out to be priceless later on. 

You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.

You have to trust in something, like your destiny, life, karma, etc. Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even if it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

In the second part of his speech, Jobs provided more references to his biography as a proof that, very often a seemingly negative event in one’s life (in Jobs’ case, his experience of having been laid off by Apple Corporation, which he founded) proves to have strongly positive consequences, as it allows a concerned individual to assess the significance of its existence from a qualitatively new perspective (speaker’s rhetorical appeal to logos).

He found what he loved early in life. He started Apple with a friend in his parents’ garage when he was 20. In 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of them into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. As Apple grew, his visions of the future of Apple began to diverge and he got fired by the Board of Directors. This was a devastating experience for him. What had been the focus of his entire life was gone.

He felt rejected, but slowly he began to realise that he still was in love with the work he did. He decided to start over again:

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.

Now he entered one of the most creative periods of his life. During the next 5 years he started a company named NeXT, and then Pixar, which turned out to be the most successful animation studio in the world, creating the world’s first computer animated feature film ‘Toy Story’.

Ironically Apple bought NeXT, and that is how Steve returned to Apple. The technology they developed at NeXT is now ‘at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance’.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. 

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. 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. You’ll know when you find it. Like any great relationship it gets better and better as the years roll on.

In the concluding part of his speech, Jobs pointed out to the fact that, despite having been diagnosed with cancer, he never lost its will to live, which in turn prompted him to adopt a proper approach towards dealing with the situation, and consequently helped Jobs to have his cancer surgically removed, without any further complications.

When he was 17, he read this quote: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” Since then, he has looked in the mirror every morning and asked himself: “If today where the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?” Whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, he knew that something needed to change.

Almost everything, all expectations, 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 to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose. There’s no reason not to follow your heart.

When he was diagnosed with cancer, at first the doctors told him that he should expect to live no longer than 3-6 months. He lived with that diagnosis for a whole day, until later that evening when he had a biopsy. It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that was curable. This was the closest he’s been to facing death.

Death is the destination that we all share, no one has ever escaped it (…). 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 result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Bibliography: 

Curriculum Development Centre. (2020). English Grade 11. Sanothimi, Bhaktapur: Government of Nepal, Curriculum Development Centre.

How to Live before you Die. Steve Jobs. TED.Com. 2005 (2021). Web. https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die?language=en

IvyPanda. (2019, June 21). Speech Analysis: “How to Live before you Die” by Steve Jobs. Retrieved from https://ivypanda.com/essays/speech-analysis-how-to-live-before-you-die-by-steve-jobs/

Wojcicka, J. (2010, 04 21). Steve Jobs: How to Live Before You Die. Retrieved from Many by Many: https://www.madebymany.com/stories/steve-jobs-how-to-live-before-you-die

 
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