Steve Jobs: How to Live Before You Die Speech

As an assignment for a class I am currently taking, we were asked to watch a speech from the TED website, give an analysis, and describe what the speech means to us.  If you are unaware of the TED concept, I highly suggest that you go to TED.com to check it out.  

I chose to watch Steve Job's Stanford commencement speech from June 2005.  Jobs to me is an important part of the music industry in part to his revolutionization of the way we get our music today.  He spoke of his failures in life, from dropping out of college, to being fired from Apple, and of the lessons that he learned from these low points in his life.  He also spoke of his brush with death from his Pancreatic cancer diagnosis.  We know now, of course, that this came back several years later to claim his life. Prior to his death, he helped to launch so many great things, and had such a great list of accomplishments, from starting Pixar, to the release of some of the most popular mobile devices in the world.  Jobs ended his speech by asking the graduates to follow something he always tried to do himself "stay hungry, stay thirsty." I took more from those words than I did anything else in the speech.  It is vital in this industry to always maintain a great passion for what you do.  If you lose the love and passion for the music, you lose touch with what really matters.  You forget about that moment at your first concert when the lights went out, the music started, and the artist exploded on stage, or the moment during your favorite song when you swear they were singing to you, and you felt more alive than you ever had.  So very simply, I repeat his words to you, as I will do for myself, "Stay Hungry, Stay Thirsty."

Steve Jobs: How to Live Before You Die