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Last week, I came across the Commencement address made by Steve Jobs, deliverd on June 12, 2005, for Stanford University. In that address, Steve shared three stories from his life, which are actually failures or disasters. It shows us that bad things happen for a good reason.

In the first story, Steve dropped out of colledge in the first 6 months because of money issue. He kept as a drop-in for another 18 month, living an extemly humble life. At that time, it was very scary. During that period, Steve took a calligraphy class. The knowledge learned from the class eventually appeared on Macintosh computer, and later, was copied into Windows by Microsoft. Without the drop-out, Steve would never bring beautiful typography into the PC world.

The second story is about being fired at his 30, which forced Steve to restart. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” Within 5 years, Steve had two successful companies, NeXT and Pixar. More importantly, he met his current wife and got married.

The third and the last story is about death. Steve fighted cancer in 2004 and lived through it. The experience tought him that “almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Particularly, I like the following two paragraphs from his speach:

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 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. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

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. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Life always has ups and downs. The only thing matters is whether one has the life that one love to live. Surely, Steve has followed his own intuition and has made enormous achievements because of that.