This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford University.

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 san 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, its 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.

Read the second story

Read the third story

Before you wish to become a victor and not a victim of life and before you wish to have a flight of celebration, ecstasy and joy, let’s understand the dynamics and mechanics of life and living.

The very reason for us being born again and again is due to the latent desire of the soul, which is to get free from the meshes and shackles of life. To be salvaged… to be liberated…

We subconsciously seek permanency in everything we do, achieve, and experience. The very phenomenon of a temporary world full of illusion, where the mind switches gears every nano second just wanting more and more, leaves us dissatisfied and disappointed. The speed of change builds stress.. The nature of change brings anxiety, hankering for fulfilment takes us in wrong directions. So our real yearning is for that which is constant. The bliss quotient can either be a conscious quest seeking the ultimate truth or it could be a calling from within.

Shut your eyes, withdraw your senses, disconnect with the outside and make yourself open and vulnerable for oneness with the existence, take a few deep breaths and breathe out equally deep. Now open your eyes and continue.. and the seeker become sought, as the famous sufi poet Rumi said, “I’ve been living on the lip of insanity, asking questions, knocking at the door… the door opens – I’ve been knocking from inside.”

To reach a point of total freedom breathing easy and relaxed, are you ready to fly? For starters, let us mingle with nature and its elements, like sitting by the sea and absorbing the energy of its waves; squatting in the garden and appreciating the creativity’s finest aesthetics; finding a quiet corner in a temple, and feeling connected within; lying down below the open sky and experience its vastness; listening to the chirping of the birds and tuning in with the rhythm of nature; inhaling the fragrance of fruits, flowers or mud and breathing out all the physiological, psychological and emotional toxins. Or simply shut your eyes in any quiet corner and start breathing in and out very slowly and smoothly in rhythm and harmony.

Breathing in the subtle and super energy and breathing out gross and subtle tensions and stress. You can do it for as long and as many times a day, till you completely blank out and empty yourselves, delving into your deepest recesses. Some call this meditation. These endeavours will release you gradually from the entrapments and you will be enslaved no more to life.. and your ticked to the primary flight is earned.

As much we need to be deeply relaxed in the state of restful awareness, we need to be extremely alert as well; which should be a perfect togetherness of dynamic stillness and profoundly passive alertness; to flow and cooperate with life and not react to it, respond and not giving resistance to it and not obstruct it. Then we become the co-creators of this existence, liberated with creative juices. This gives us extreme power of transformation alchemy. All transformations and transcendence happen in contrast of deepest relaxation and extreme alertness together; in this state one can experience immense sense of freedom, liberation of energy thoughts, words, deeds and infinite creativity making you the alchemist.

This gives you wings for a higher flight, a sense of freedom and a hope of never ending vastness which is the immeasurable potential of all that was, is, and will be. This is truly and simply, how great people become extraordinary quite simply, in the quest of simple truth!

Should you wish to have eternal wings to fly with ecstasy celebrating your own being and the being of existence cultivate these five points of inner beauty

Compassion
Be unconditionally and selflessly loving and love even those you don’t love you.

Benevolence
Be kind even to those who are not kind to you.

Philanthrophy
From love to empathy, from wealth to service, and from forgiving yourself to forgiving others be magnanimous

Grace
Accepting life as it is with grace and responding to it with simply grace

Creativity
From harmony to abundance, from bonding and creating joy of life to every aspect of life

This is a process and shall be achieved with the passage of time only if you attend to life in profound state of consciousness, witnessing it as it passes by without judging it. Difficult though, but certainly possible only if you will it.