Or so I thought, until I cast my mind back to my own graduation.

The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock, Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one because it turns out that I can't remember a single word, she said.

Life doesn't happen to you.

It happens for you.

How do I know this?

I don't.

But I'm making sound, and that's the important thing.

Sometimes I think that's the only thing that's important, really.

You know, it's just letting each other know we're here reminding each other that we're part of a larger self.

Please stay connected.

Please never lose eye contact.

This may not be a lesson you want to hear from a person who creates media, but we're spending more time looking down on our devices, and then we are looking at each other's eyes.

My mom was driving through this town of Ann Arbor was the mid 19 sixties.

She was a newcomer to this town and to this country.

Her car breaks down.

Now let me paint you a picture.

She is an immigrant from the other side of the world.

She went to the closest phone move phone booth and decided to randomly call someone on Indian person whose name began in the A's.

Someone answered the phone after the first ring.

As it turns out, the person she was trying to call wasn't home, but his roommate, her future husband, my father waas many of you here today.

You're getting a diploma at this idea league school because you have committed yourself to a dream and worked hard to achieve it.

And there is no greater cliche in a commencement address than follow your dream.

Well, I'm here to tell you that whatever you think your dream is now, it will probably change.

And that's okay.

From 1998 when I was still up in early 2004 I spent each of those six years always thinking that I would get that big record deal within the next few months.

I always thought my moment was just around the corner, but I was rejected by all the major labels.

Some of them rejected me multiple times, but I did find a young producer from Chicago named Kanye West, who believed in me.

I found what I loved to do early in life.

Woz 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 4000 employees.

We just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I just turned 30 and then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started?

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, but something slowly began to dawn on me.

I still loved what I did, 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.

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.

Your work is gonna 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 and don't settle.

I paid the rent in my early twenties by working at the African research department of Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I waas to live in a country with a democratically elected government where legal representation and a public trial where the rights of everyone every day I saw more evidence about the evils humankind would inflict on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who have never bean tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have the power of human empathy leading to collective action saves lives.

Finally, graduates are our greatness has never, ever come from sitting back and feeling entitled to what we have.

It's never come from folks who climbed the ladder of success or who happened to be born near the top and then pull the ladder up after themselves.

No, uh, our greatness has always come from people who expect nothing and take nothing for granted.

Folks who work hard for what they have been reached back and help others after them.

While you may 1 day forget this moment, I never, ever will go blue love you.