rickshangle.com

    • July 7, 2005

    Steve Jobs Stanford Univ Commencement Speech

    Filed under: Apple, Media — rshangle @ 7:39 am

    This was passed to me by a fellow student in my screenwriting class. Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford on June 12th 2005.

    Not a man unafraid of death, but rather knows how to leverage the knowledge of death appropriately.

    The speech, which I have not fact-checked, nor will I at any time in the future.

    rds

    One Response to “Steve Jobs Stanford Univ Commencement Speech”

    1. rshangle Says:
      July 8th, 2005 at 11:36 am

      “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 is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

      - Steve Jobs, 2005

      “When I was under the influence of the cough syrup, I realized that my death was coming at some time in the future, and that my odds of escaping it were, statistically speaking, zero. Which is to say that no one has really escaped death. So although I can’t say it’s not possible to escape my death in the future, the odds are, as you can imagine, low.

      The thought of my death was not comforting, but it was not scary, either. It’s something everyone has to deal with, I’m sure.

      If you never do deal with it, I suspect that you are in for a very nasty surprise at the end of your life when, one day, you actually die.

      I have known people who died; some were close to me, some were just acquaintances. I guess you could say I had no real expectation that I would, somehow, escape death where practically every other organism that ever lived had not.

      And if I am offending a religious concept that is very dear to you, I apologize in advance – I am speaking of purely biological life and death, here. No offense is intended. Although if you are offended by this, you were also almost certainly offended by the cough syrup comment. Please forgive me, and forgive me again.

      Since I had ascertained, for the first practical time in my life, that death was coming, I had some decisions to make and questions to answer.

      Things like what am I going to do with my life, why am I here, and what mark, if any, do I want to leave on planet to indicate I had ever lived?”

      - Dief Minusky, 2001

      So brevity is the soul of wit, after all. A learning.

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