Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement speech highlights how his frame of mind drove him to success. I could feel echoes of his three stories reverberating throughout my life, though I hadn’t realized it initially. Below I’ll be highlighting the key points of his stories, as well as how they personally relate to me.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.
Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
Jobs’ first story is about connecting the dots. Essentially, it illustrates that while something may seem pointless or irrelevant in the moment, you’ll never know when it’ll play a part in the future. To give an anecdote of my own, before attending The College of New Jersey I attended a vocational high school, with a focus in Information Technology. At the time, sitting in my coding class, typing away at my keyboard, I thought it was the biggest waste of time of my life. Little did I know how useful it was to be thrown into learning Java and HTML right off the bat. It’s made learning other coding languages, primarily C# in Unity easier than I could imagine. Taking classes I’m passionate about made me realize the value in the ones that I wasn’t passionate about.
His second story was about love and loss. Here, Jobs brought attention to a fact that designers too often forget; it’s okay to fail. After Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, rather than moping around and fantasizing over what could have been, he picked himself back up, and got back to work. He used his failure as a springboard to get involved with Pixar, and achieve even more success. Once again, I can relate this to my experiences in high school. Specifically, enrolling to attend the school to begin with. After taking an exam to see if we’ll be admitted on campus, we were asked to rank the five schools on the campus in the order that we wanted to attend them in. I ranked the engineering high school as first on my list; not because I had any particular affinity toward engineering, but rather because I had heard it was the “best” out of the five. When I received my results and saw I was accepted into the IT school, the news was bitter-sweet. With that said, my experiences there ended up guiding me to where I am now. Had I not been rejected from that engineering high school, I likely wouldn’t be an IMM major today.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
The final story explores how death can be transformed from a tragic, morbid inevitability to a motivating factor. Thankfully, I presently don’t have to worry about when my time is going to come to an end. Despite this, I could resonate with the point that Jobs was getting across.It’s important to live every life to work towards your end goal. His tangent about how he would ask himself in the mirror if he was happy with the work he was doing, and if he wasn’t he would take steps to change that, sent a chill down my spine. This philosophy, I feel, embodies the spirit of IMM to a T. It’s alright if you’re not where you want to be right now; but what are you going to do to change it? This final story serves as an eloquent mantra for all designers to follow.