Steve Jobs on Remembering That You Will Die

Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement address is among the most-watched speeches about living. Its third part is about death. This article describes what he said, the health scare behind it, and what happened afterward. It quotes only a short phrase and otherwise paraphrases; the full speech is easy to find online.

What was the speech?

A commencement address at Stanford on June 12, 2005, to the university’s 114th graduating class. Stanford News reported that Jobs, then chief executive of Apple and Pixar, spoke in jeans and sandals under his robe. He told three stories: about connecting the dots of his life, about love and loss, and about death.

What did he say about death?

That it made his choices clearer. He said that as a teenager he read a saying that if you live each day as if it were your last, someday you will be right. After that he began asking himself in the mirror each morning whether he would want to do what he was about to do if it were his last day. When the answer was “no” too many days in a row, he knew something had to change, according to Rev’s transcript. He called remembering that he would soon be dead the most important tool he had found for making big choices. His reason, as NPR’s transcript has it, was that almost everything else, such as other people’s expectations, pride, and fear of embarrassment or failure, falls away in the face of death. He called death “very likely the single best invention of life.” He ended by urging graduates not to waste their limited time living someone else’s life.

What happened to his health?

He had been through a cancer scare. Stanford News reported that about a year before the speech, doctors told Jobs he had pancreatic cancer and gave him up to six months to live. He said that after a biopsy, the cancer turned out to be a rare form that could be cured with surgery, and he had the operation. NPR reports he was diagnosed in 2003, and HealthPlexus says 2004, so accounts differ. He told the graduates this was the closest he had come to facing death, and that he hoped it would remain the closest for a few more decades.

He did not get those decades. HealthPlexus reports he needed a liver transplant in 2009, and that the slow-growing cancer most likely came back or spread. Jobs died on October 5, 2011, at 56, more than seven years after his diagnosis, NPR reported.

What does the speech actually show?

That a person can find clarity in a scare, and that clarity can guide choices. It does not show that everyone will be helped in the same way, and it was spoken by someone who had just been given a reprieve. The speech is advice about living for people at the start of their working lives. It does not describe what dying is like. Research on whether reminders of death change behavior is mixed. See Memento Mori and Terror Management Theory.

Where can I learn more?

See What Do Dying People Really Regret? and Oliver Sacks’s Farewell Essay on His Own Dying.