Conventional Wisdom: Everyone Wants To Face Death

At age 50, Steve Jobs gave the 2005 Commencement address to the graduating class of Stanford. Throughout his speech, he references both his real world examples of rhetoric, and allowed the class to question their own path in life. His speech was both on his path towards failure and success, and his story on how he transformed from a college dropout to the CEO of Apple Computers and Pixar Animation. By utilizing all techniques of rhetoric, including logos, pathos, and ethos, he allows the students to be experience to his story and allows them to go down a blank path in life.

This point is illustrated when he says, “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life… Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” Steve Jobs is a person who decided to live every day like he was dying to ensure that he had gotten the most out of the life he had. He adds the tension of his cancer diagnosis to show how quickly things could end for anyone. “try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have ten years to tell them in just a few months” shows how no one really knows how much time they have left. He makes everyone aware of the revelations he had at this point of his life in order to make sure that people didn’t have to come upon a similar situation to reach that same conclusion.

Steve Jobs, who is known as one of the greatest innovators of our time, had given a speech in 2005 to new graduates from Stanford. As many would find this ironic since he never graduated from college, but by the end of the speech they have realized why he was there to give the speech. He successfully gives the speech by using multiple rhetorical devices such as repetition of life experiences as well as common emotion that everyone consists of. By using those, his goals are to have the new graduates continue through life by doing what they love to do no matter what obstacles comes across their life.

A commencement speech as powerful as Steve Jobs sticks in your head and ruminates for a long time. His advice touches home and leaves you thinking about the decisions that you make in your life and whether those decisions will connect to your future. As we make decisions in our lives, we should all remember to follow Steve’s advice do what you love, don’t give

In his 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University, Steve Jobs makes three major claims that he uses to send off this generation of college grads. His first claim is about connecting the dots of our decisions and how we can only see the good that comes from them in the future. Jobs’ second claim is about love and how no matter what we're doing it must be what we love . His final claim is about death, and how no one wants to die even if they want to go to heaven.

One element that contributes to Steve Jobs’ ethos is the fact that he is so successful in his career. Already knowing who Steve Jobs was, he led the audience to the appeal that we is successful because of his company in which he worked hard for. One of the first things he mentioned in his speech to make it so he is comes off as smart when he says he created Apple, a multi-billion dollar company, and Pixar, the “most successful animation studio in the world.” This adds on to his knowledgeable self, creating validity because the people listening view Jobs as being high in the successful level and makes the audience believe him. Jobs continues with his reliability by saying that he was a college dropout and still went on to be extremely successful.

This past quarter we have read a variety of texts about our future and how to be successful. One commencement speech in particular, by Steve Jobs, stood out because it talks about all the things you need to follow in life. I fully agree with the things he says. He includes three main points to follow in life that he realized when he was on the verge of death. Overall, he just wants to tell you that everything happens for a reason, do not regret anything, and live life to the fullest. This was his way of telling the new graduates how to be successful in life. To me, accepting what happens and being happy is the most important quality in life.

Steve Jobs was the person who created the company “Apple”, who mainly focuses on computer science. He was a very wise, unique, optimistic, and intelligent human being. His speech at Stanford was one of the greatest speeches I have heard in a very long time. After listening to that speech, I realized that Steve was trying to send a message to everybody. His arguments are that college isn’t necessary in order to become successful in life, you must find what you love in life, and live everyday like it’s your last day.

On his commencement speech to Stanford students on June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple computers and PIXAR animations, used carefully crafted inspirational anecdotes and rhetorical devices like ethos and pathos to move his audience to explore, follow their dream and do what they love no matter the odds.

In his speech, Jobs first sets the stage by sharing the story of his adoption; he explains the difficulty of his adoption process and the promise that ultimately led him to college where he eventually decides to drop out six months later. He then goes on to share the story of his ten year process of creating the Apple Company, the challenges he faced when being fired from Apple, and how passion and faith led him to a better path. Jobs lastly shares his battle with cancer and his face to face experience with death which made him realize how valuable and limited life is. These three key events portray failure, loss, hardship, faith, passion, and success.

Steve Jobs’s commencement speech was primarily directed toward inspiring the Stanford graduates to follow their dreams once they go out into the real world, no matter what way life takes them. He looks to guide his primary audience with him “[wanting] to tell [them] three stories from [his] life”, which look to teach them lessons about starting up, love/loss, and death. Besides the primary audience, the orator also gears his speech towards the entrepreneurs out there with improbable visions just by explaining multiple instances where he “didn’t know what to do”, but how he bounced back and his life got “better and better” later on. Furthermore, with the millennial generation in mind, Jobs purposely incorporates jokes like how “Windows copied the Mac” and how he was “very publically out” of his own company to appeal to those who had seen these controversial snip bits on the news from time to time. With twenty-seven million views on this speech to date, Steve Jobs conveyed his exigence to countless numbers of rhetorical audiences who sympathized with

“It turned out that being fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me,” said Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a successful, college dropout. In his speech How to Live Before You Die he explains his journey to success. Steve gave his speech to the graduating class of 2005 from Stanford College. Throughout his speech, he uses trust, emotion, and facts to persuade the grads to find what they love and pursuit it.

Steve Jobs admitted that when he came close to death and survived, he would never want to come near it again. “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share” (Commencement Address, Jobs). Death is the end point and everyone knows it. There is no getting past it. This is why Steve Jobs believe that death is Life’s greatest invention. Death’s purpose was to create a fresh start for others, and although everyone

Steve, after five years, created a company called NeXT. Also another named Pixar. Not only did those two companies’ bring him happiness. He had even fallen in love with an amazing woman. To think none of this would have not even happened if he was not fired from Apple. He said that sometimes life hits you with a brick. It is true. But what matters is if you let it keep you down. You have to have faith in what you believe and want to achieve. Anything can happen in your future.

Steve Jobs chooses to present his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 with an unpretentious, humble tone stating this is the closest he has ever gotten to his actual college graduation. This tone of unpretention and humility makes it clear the speech will not be filled with hyperbole or "when I was your age" platitudes. Instead the humor and humility and set the foundation for a blatantly honest journey through his life and the need to concentrate on ones' passions and beliefs above all else. He takes the audience through his own academic journey, making sure to show them it was highly nonconformist in structure yet directly aligned to what mattered most to him. He said these years at Reed College helped to understand typography, which led to the development of proportionally-spaced fonts on the Apple Macintosh, a technological first. He can't resist taking a jab at Microsoft during this stage of the speech, staying like many other Apple innovations, Windows also stole this aspect of font design. The students loved it and erupt in applause and laughter. He's clearly connected with the audience and allowed them into his life. He then progresses to discuss what death means to him, in poignant terms, prescient of his own untimely passing. He wraps up the speech by telling the audience to "stay young, stay foolish" and never to take anyone else's expectations as your own limits to reality. As one of the