Ein Video, das mir nach wie vor sehr am Herzen liegt, ist das der visionären Stanford Rede des Apple-Gründer und früheren Pixar-Chefs Steve Jobs, die er am 14. Juni 2005 bei der akademischen Abschlussfeier der amerikanischen Universität gehalten hat.
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Steve Jobs‘ berühmte Stanford-Rede, gehalten bei der Abschlussfeier 2005, ist eine inspirierende Reflexion über Leben, Leidenschaft und die Bedeutung von Mut. Obwohl diese Rede nun bereits fast genau sechs Jahre alt ist, enthält sie ein paar der wichtigsten Grundsätze, die zu einem erfüllten Leben führen. Bei der Gestaltung des eigenen Lebens sollten sie für jeden einzelnen große Bedeutung haben. Dabei spricht Jobs gerade über ganz grundsätzliche Dinge im Leben: Berufung, Liebe, Tod und wie wertvoll Rückschläge sein können.
Ironisch ist, dass der Abschlussredner in Stanford von 2005 selbst keinen Hochschulabschluss besitzt, doch hat Jobs den Absolventen eine Hand voll Lebensweisheiten an die Hand zu geben, die er in seinem bewegten Leben selbst erfahren hat. Dazu erzählt er drei Geschichten aus seinem Leben.
Übersicht Stanford Rede
Jobs teilt drei Geschichten aus seinem Leben, um zeitlose Lektionen zu vermitteln:
- Verbinde die Punkte: Jobs erzählt von seinem Studienabbruch und wie scheinbar unzusammenhängende Entscheidungen später einen bedeutenden Einfluss hatten, wie sein Interesse an Kalligrafie, das die Typografie des Macintosh revolutionierte. Seine Botschaft: Man kann die Punkte nur rückblickend verbinden, weshalb Vertrauen in den Weg essenziell ist.
- Liebe und Verlust: Nachdem Jobs von Apple gefeuert wurde, fand er durch Neuanfänge wie NeXT und Pixar seine Leidenschaft neu. Er betont, dass Rückschläge Chancen für Wachstum sein können, und fordert dazu auf, das zu finden, was man wirklich liebt, um Großes zu schaffen.
- Sterblichkeit: Jobs reflektiert über seine Krebserkrankung und wie die Konfrontation mit dem Tod half, Wichtiges von Unwichtigem zu unterscheiden. Seine Botschaft: Das Leben ist kurz – verschwende es nicht mit den Erwartungen anderer und folge deinem Herzen.
Teil 1: die Punkte verbinden
Die erste Geschichte, die Steve Jobs in seiner Stanford Rede erzählt, beginnt damit, dass er nach nur sechs Monaten die Uni aufgab, da er nicht im geringsten erkennen konnte, wie sie ihm bei der Frage, was er mit seinem Leben anfangen wollte, helfen könnte. Dies sollte einer der vielen Punkte in Jobs Leben werden, die höchst verunsichernd waren, aber rückblickend eine der besten Entscheidungen in seinem Leben bedeuteten. Statt die Pflicht-Seminare zu besuchen, belegte er Seminare, die für ihn interessant schienen. Zwar hatten diese zunächst keine Aussicht auf praktische Anwendung in seinem Leben, aber seiner Intuition und Neugierde gefolgt zu sein, stellte sich später als „unbezahlbar“ heraus, wie Jobs sagt. Als Beispiel führt er seinen Kalligraphie-Kurs an, bei dem er alles über Serifen, Buchstabenabstände und Co lernte, – kurz – alles, was Typographie großartig und ästhetisch macht. Während dies zunächst keinen Nutzen hatte, sollte es später, als er den Macintosh Computer designt, dazu führen, dass dieser der erst Computer mit schöner Typographie ist. Und “weil Windows Mac einfach kopierte”, so Jobs, hätte heute wahrscheinlich kein PC eine schöne Typographie, hätte er nicht den Kalligraphie-Kurs absolviert. „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”. Wir müssen also auf unsere Fähigkeiten, unser Schicksal und unser Leben vertrauen, denn wir können den Sinn für bestimmte Punkte im Leben nicht in der Vorschau sehen, sondern immer nur in der Rückschau. Das hat den Unterschied in seinem Leben gemacht, wie Steve Jobs betont.
Teil 2: über Liebe und Verlust
In seiner zweiten Episode aus seinem Leben, erzählt der Apple-Gründer von den Höhen und Tiefen seiner Karriere. Nach einem kometenhaften Aufstieg seines Unternehmens innerhalb von weniger als zehn Jahren, kam für Jobs ein herber Rückschlag, als er mit 30 Jahren öffentlich aus dem Unternehmen gefeuert wurde. Am liebsten wäre er weggelaufen, sagt Steve Jobs, denn er hatte das Gefühl, den Staffelstab in dem Moment fallengelassen zu haben, als er ihm überreicht wurde. Doch etwas dämmerte ihm: Noch immer liebte er diesen Beruf.
„I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.”
Steve Jobs
Tatsächlich sollte der Rauswurf bei Apple zum Startschuss der kreativsten Phase im Leben von Steve Jobs werden, denn in den nächsten fünf Jahren gründete er die Firma NeXT, das heute erfolgreichste Animationsstudio der Welt Pixar und verliebte sich in die Frau, die er später heiraten würde. Außerdem kaufte Apple NeXT und somit kehrte Jobs zu Apple zurück und bescherte der Firma mit seiner bei NeXT entwickelten Technologie eine Renaissance.
Manchmal hält das Leben eine bittere Pille für uns bereit, wie Jobs sagt. Aber man darf seinen Glauben nicht verlieren und muss weiterhin das tun, was man liebt. Das hat Jobs zum Erfolg geführt. Eindringlich appelliert er an die Studenten: Findet, was ihr liebt. Eure Arbeit wird einen großen Teil eures Lebens ausmachen und der einzige Weg, zufrieden zu sein, ist, seine Arbeit gut zu machen. Die einzige Art, seine Arbeit gut zu machen, liegt jedoch darin, seine Arbeit zu lieben. Wenn ihr noch nicht wisst, was ihr liebt, sucht weiter – lehnt euch nicht zurück!
„Love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Steve Jobs
Teil 3: eine Geschichte über den Tod
Seine dritte Geschichte in seiner Stanford Rede leitet Steve Jobs mit einem Zitat ein, das ihn seit seinem 17. Lebensjahr begleitet: „Wenn du jeden Tag lebst, als sei es Dein Letzter, wirst du eines Tages höchstwahrscheinlich recht haben.“ Diesem Zitat folgend befragt Jobs seitdem jeden Morgen sein Spiegelbild, ob er genau das tun würde, was er heute tut, wenn er wüsste, dass er nur noch diesen Tag zu leben hätte. Jobs erklärt, dass wenn die Antwort auf diese Frage zu viele Tage am Stück „Nein“ lautete, dann wusste er, dass er etwas ändern muss. Das „Memento Mori“ sei sein wichtigstes Instrument, um die großen Entscheidungen im Leben zu treffen. Denn alles Unwichtige – äußere Erwartungen, Stolz, Angst vor Blamagen oder Versagen – fällt im Angesicht des Todes weg und hinterlässt nur noch das wirklich Wichtige. So sei das Bewusstsein unserer Sterblichkeit der schnellste Weg zur Sicherheit, dass wir nichts zu verlieren haben. „You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Nachdem Steve Jobs seine 2004 diagnostizierte Krebserkrankung überwunden hat, kann er einmal mehr festhalten, dass der Tod „die beste Erfindung des Lebens“ ist, denn er sei „Life’s change agent“. Appellierend an die graduierten Studenten betont er, dass unsere Lebenszeit begrenzt ist – wir dürfen sie somit nicht damit verschwenden, das Leben eines anderen zu führen.
„Überhört bei all dem Lärm der anderen Meinungen nicht eure innere Stimme und habt den Mut, Eurem Herzen und Eurer Intuition zu folgen. Sie wissen bereits, was du wirklich sein möchtest. Alles andere ist zweitrangig.“
Steve Jobs
Zum Abschluss
Steve Jobs entlässt die frisch gebackenen Absolventen mit einem Zitat eines seiner Lieblingsbücher der vor-digitalen Zeit, „The Whole Earth Catalog“. Was er sich selbst immer gewünscht hat, wünscht er an diesem Punkt des Neubeginns auch den Absolventen:
„Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish“ – Bleibt (lebens)hungrig, bleibt töricht!
Steve Jobs
Die Stanford von Steve Jobs Rede bleibt ein kraftvolles Plädoyer für Authentizität und Leidenschaft. Ein wahrhaft inspirierender Vortrag, der uns helfen kann, sowohl im Leben als auch im Beruf neue Wege zu gehen und die richtigen Entscheidungen zu treffen. Danke!
Video: Steve Jobs Stanford Rede
Transkript
Steve Jobs Stanford Rede: I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
Truth be told, uh, I never graduated from college. And, uh, 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 It’s about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.
So why’d I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed 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’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him? They said, of course. My biological mother found out later 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 go to college. This was the start in my life. 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 the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out. Okay.
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 far more 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 five cent deposits to buy food with. And I would walk the seven 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 ten 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 that 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 backwards ten years later.
Again, 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.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I love 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’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d 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. And 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’d 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, and I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.
And Loreen 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, sometimes life’s gonna hit 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 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, and 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, 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, 33 years, I’ve 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 and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten 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. It I live 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 doctor 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 thankfully 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’s 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’s 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 drowned 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 Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late sixties 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, 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.
