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Home » Full Transcript: Steve Jobs’ Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish Speech at Stanford (2005)

Full Transcript: Steve Jobs’ Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish Speech at Stanford (2005)

Here is the full transcript (Edited version) of the famous Steve Jobs’ ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish’ speech which was delivered at Stanford on June 12, 2005. This transcript is without the intro by Stanford President John Hennessy. If you want the full transcript with the intro version, please click here.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Thank you. I am honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And 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.

Connecting the Dots

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 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’ve got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.”

My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.