We all remember when Steve Jobs passed away in October, he unfortunately lost his battle to cancer. Upon his death, Jobs' Stanford speech went viral. He speaks about his early life, how he dropped out of college, how he followed his intuition, got fired and re-hired, and how you have to trust in something. The most powerful part of his speech was Jobs telling the students, "For the past 33 years I've looked in the mirror and asked myself, 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 has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."   After watching Jobs' speech I began routing around a little and found many other wonderful speeches that other significant people have given at graduation ceremonies. Another powerful speech is Oprah Winfrey's speech at Howard university. We all know the great success story of Oprah, but here she shares two stories 1) how to get successful 2) how you have responsibility to give back when you do become successful. On talking about becoming successful, she says, "Don't worry about it, relax." She said all you need to know who is you are and the rest will follow.  
The first part of her speech can be viewed here - for some reason I couldn't embed it. Both Oprah's and Jobs' speeches share one theme, they are both relentless in getting across that you need to uncover what you are passionate about and get about the business of doing it. Which led me to think, how many of us actually uncover this in our lifetime?

Jobs' and Oprah

Posted on

Monday 11 June 2012

Leave a Reply