Rhetorical Analysis On Steve Jobs

Connecting the dots of life: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, gave the commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Stanford University on how you may not know it now, but everything connects in the end, even dropping out of college.

In his short 15-minute speech, Jobs outlines the ways that his college struggles, company losses, and cancer challenges motivated him and how the graduates can learn from his life. "You can't connect the looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards," Jobs told the graduates. The sun was bright and shining down on the audience in an outdoor stadium. They were using paper to shield their eyes to watch Jobs speak. He spoke about the ways his past influenced his future, inspiring the young graduates to "stay hungry, stay foolish".

He told the audience that his decision to drop out was determined before he was even born. Jobs explains that his biological mother was not a college graduate, and that this would influence his future.

"I'm a first-generation student, neither of my parents went to college, no one in my family had actually ever been to college before, except me and my sister, so I definitely think it [the past] has some influence," Said Halie Hawkins, a Stanford student, "it’s a lot of pressure because you feel like you need to go to college to fulfill what your parents wish they could have done, but at the same time its really exhausting when you don’t know what you want to do and college might not even be for you."

In the second story he discusses loss, and how it should not be a set pack put push you to work harder. Jobs is optimistic when he mentions that "being fired from apple was the best thing that could ever happened to me". This motivated him to create new companies like Pixar and