It’s graduation season and that means it’s commencement speech season. I’ve said before that my all time favorite commencement address is Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. For the 20th anniversary, the Steve Jobs Archive published an upscaled 4K version of the speech on its site and on YouTube (embedded below).
There are some previously unknown nuggets of information that they share about the speech.
He did not know he wasn’t the students’ top choice for a speaker. They wanted comedian Jon Stewart, who had given a popular commencement address the year before. Arnold Schwarzenegger, movie star-turned-governor of California, was the third choice.
I give a fair amount of presentations in my work and this gave me some comfort.
Steve showed only one sign of nerves—and you had to really know him to recognize it. From his opening comments (“This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation”) to his closing wish that students “stay hungry, stay foolish,” he read his text verbatim.
He even wrote emails to himself with bulleted talking points. Be sure to read all of them.
★