Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech

Steve Jobs gave this 14.5 minute address to Stanford graduates in 2005. It is an inspiring speech, which calls upon the graduating students to have the courage to follow their passion. It would have been an even more appropriate speech to give to the entering freshman class because while in school students have the freedom to seek their passion and to make mistakes.

Text transcript of the speech.

Here are a few quotes from the speech:

"The minute I dropped out (of Reed College), I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting...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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition."

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."