discour de steeve jobs a Stanford en 2005

« 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 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 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.

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 4000 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 worlds 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. »