Summary

On the 14th June 2005, Steve Jobs gave a speech at the Stanford University. He told three stories of his life.

His first story was about connecting the dots.
Steve Jobs never graduated from college. When he was born, his biological mother decided to give him in adoption. She wanted him to be adopted by college graduated, so that he could go to the college too. But at the last moment, the couple decided they wanted to have a girl, and another couple adopted him. Both two hadn't graduated from the college, but they promised his biological mother, he would someday go to the college.
Steve Jobs went to the college, but then he dropped out and dedicated himself only to the lessons he was really interested in. So he followed the calligraphy class, and learned about calligraphy. All that he learned hadn't got a practical application at the moment. But then, all came back to him when he designed the first Macintosh computer. It was the first computer with a fantastic typography.
So, you can only connecting the dots looking backwards, not forward: you can only act and trust that all you made will somehow connect in your future.

His second story was about love and loss.
The company that he had created with his friends had grew up. They had hired someone to run the company. A year after his and their visions about the future began to diverge, and he got fired by the same company he had founded.
So, he started again from zero: he started two new companies named NeXT and Pixar, and fell in love with his present wife. Then, NeXT was bought by Apple, and he returned to be part of his first company.

His third story was about death.
When he was 17, he read a quote: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." Since that day, every morning he looked in the mirror and asked himself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?". And if the answer was "No" for too many days in a row, he knew that he needed to change something.
A year before he had been diagnosed with a cancer. The doctors told him that he was going to have from three to six month of life. He had been living all the morning thinking that he would have told all that to his children... that he would have had a very little time to say them all the things he would have told them in the following ten years. Then, he had had a biopsy. And it had turned up to be a very rare form of cancer that is curable with a surgery. He had had the surgery and then he had been fine.
The thing he learned from that is that nobody wants to die. And nobody has to spend his life living someone else's life, because life is too short to be wasted not trying to follow your own dreams.

He concluded talking about another quote that he had read when he was young. It had been written at the end of the last issue of The Whole Earth Catalog. There was a photograph of an early morning country road. Under that picture, there was written: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." This is what he had always wished for himself, and what he wished for all that people that was listening to him.