Shadowing Practice: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Thank you.

I'm 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.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months,

but then stayed around as a drop -in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.

So why'd 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, 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.

She refused to sign the final adoption papers.

She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life.

And 17 years later, I did go to college.

But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford.

And all of my working class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.

After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.

So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.

It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me

and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic.

I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms.

I returned Coke bottles for the five -cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday

night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

I loved it.

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.

Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand -calligraphed.

Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

I learned about serif and sans -serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

And we designed it all into the Mac.

It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class,

and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.

But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward.

You can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You have to trust in something.

Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Because believing that the dots will connect down the road...

will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well -worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky.

I found what I loved to do early in life.

Waz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20.

We worked hard, and in 10 years,

Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4 ,000 employees.

We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned 30.

And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started?

Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me.

And for the first year or so, things went well.

But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out.

When we did, our board of directors sided with him.

And so at 30, I was out, and very publicly out.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months.

I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.

I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me.

I still loved what I did.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.

I'd been rejected, but I was still in love.

And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named Next,

another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple,

and the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.

It was awful -tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick.

Don't lose faith.

100

I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

101

You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.

102

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,

103

and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work,

104

and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

105

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.

106

As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

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And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

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So keep looking.

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Don't settle.

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My third story is about death.

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When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, if you live each day as if it was your last,

112

someday you'll most certainly be right.

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It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself,

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if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?

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And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

116

Remembering

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that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

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Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death,

119

leaving only what is truly important.

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Remembering

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that you are going to die is the best way

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I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

123

You are already naked.

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There is no reason not to follow your heart.

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About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer.

126

I had a scan at 7 .30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

127

I didn't even know what a pancreas was.

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The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer

129

that is incurable and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

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My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

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It means to try and tell your kids everything.

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you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.

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It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.

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It means to say your goodbyes.

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I live with that diagnosis all day.

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Later that evening, I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines,

137

put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

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I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope,

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the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

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I had the surgery, and thankfully, I'm fine now.

141

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.

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Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than

143

when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.

144

No one wants to die.

145

Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

146

And yet, death is the destination we all share.

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No one has ever escaped it.

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And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.

149

It's life's change agent.

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It clears out the old to make way for the new.

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Right now, the new is you.

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But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

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Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true.

154

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

155

Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

156

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

157

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

158

They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

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Everything else is secondary.

160

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation.

161

It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

162

This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras.

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It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.

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It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

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Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then, when it had run its course,

166

they put out a final issue.

167

It was the mid -1970s, and I was your age.

168

On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road,

169

the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

170

Beneath it were the words, stay hungry, stay foolish.

171

It was their farewell message as they signed off.

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Stay hungry, stay foolish.

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And I have always wished that for myself.

174

And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

175

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

176

Thank you all very much.

177

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005”. This video has 177 sentences and 2262 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:19. The speaker talks at a natural 158 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
connect verb	/kəˈnɛkt/	To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object.
dot noun	/dɑt/	A small, round spot.
hungry adjective	/ˈhʌŋ.ɡɹi/	Affected by hunger; having the physical need for food.
foolish adjective	/ˈfuː.lɪʃ/	Lacking good sense or judgement as a general trait; unwise; stupid.
settle verb	/ˈsɛtəl/	To determine (something which was exposed to doubt or question); to resolve conclusively; to set or fix (a time, an order of succession, etc).
trap noun	/tɹæp/	A machine or other device designed to catch (and sometimes kill) animals, either by holding them in a container, or by catching hold of part of the body.
biological adjective	/ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/	Of or relating to biology.
garage noun	/ɡəˈɹɑʒ/	A building (or section of a building) used to store a car or cars, tools and other miscellaneous items.
adopt verb	/əˈdɑpt/	To take voluntarily (a child of other parents) to be in the place of, or as, one's own child.
adoption noun	/əˈdɑp.ʃən/	The act of adopting.
someday adverb		Sometime; at some unspecified time in the future.
tumor noun	/tuː.məɹ/	An abnormal growth; differential diagnosis includes abscess, metaplasia, and neoplasia.
backward adjective	/ˈbækwɚd/	Situated toward or at the rear of something.
intuition noun	/ˌɪn.tjuːˈɪʃ.ən/	Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes.
meal noun	/ˈmiːl/	Food that is prepared and eaten, usually at a specific time, and usually in a comparatively large quantity.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
drop out verb	To leave (school, a race, etc.) prematurely and voluntarily.
put out verb	To blind (eyes).
clear away verb	To tidy up, to remove mess or obstacles from a place to make it neat.
clear out verb	To completely empty.
come along verb	To accompany.
fall out verb	To come out of something by falling.
find out verb	To discover, as by asking or investigating.
live through verb	To survive a difficult period or event

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

So why'd I drop out?
Do you want him?
How can you get fired from a company you started?
I'd been rejected, but I was still in love.
I didn't even know what a pancreas was.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	be told · was born · should be adopted
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've ever gotten · haven't found · have looked
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	someone who I · woman who would · order, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 36 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, didn't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: throat /ˈθɹoʊt/, beneath /bɪˈniːθ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: foolish /ˈfuː.lɪʃ/, garage /ɡəˈɹɑʒ/, adoption /əˈdɑp.ʃən/, intuition /ˌɪn.tjuːˈɪʃ.ən/, publication /ˌpʌblɪˈkeɪʃ(ə)n/
Long words — get the stress right: biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, intuition /ˌɪn.tjuːˈɪʃ.ən/, publication /ˌpʌblɪˈkeɪʃ(ə)n/, intellectual /ˌɪntəˈlɛkt͡ʃʊəl/, destination /dɛstɪˈneɪʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like connect, dot, hungry.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?

【日英字幕】2026ハーバード卒業演説自身のハーバード学生生活から人生の教訓まで、ユーモアを交えて語るコナン流感動の卒業スピーチ