You've Got to Find What You Love

Jobs's Stanford commencement speech — three stories about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death — is probably the most watched graduation address of the twenty-first century, and reading the transcript rather than watching the video is clarifying. Stripped of Jobs's delivery, the arguments are specific and honest: calligraphy classes that shaped the Mac's typography, getting fired from Apple as the most creative thing that could have happened, living with a cancer diagnosis as a design constraint on time. For product direction the speech is useful not as motivation but as a case study in retrospective sense-making — Jobs's point is that the dots only connect looking backwards, which is a serious claim about how to navigate uncertainty. Short, widely available, worth rereading every few years.