“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.”
— Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech (2005)
Steve Jobs stood before Stanford University’s graduating class in 2005 as one of the most consequential figures in modern technology. He had co-founded Apple, been forced out of it, returned to save it, and along the way helped build Pixar into a storytelling powerhouse. By that point, he had also recently survived a cancer diagnosis, and that weight quietly shapes every word of this speech.
When he told those graduates to find what they love, he was not offering a polished corporate slogan. He was speaking from a life that had been genuinely organized around that principle. The products he championed, from the Macintosh to the iPod to what would soon become the iPhone, were built on an obsessive belief that work could be both useful and beautiful. He had lived the cost of caring that deeply, and the reward of it.
The comparison he draws between work and love is deliberate and a little provocative. He wanted people to hold their careers to the same standard they hold their closest relationships: not settling, staying honest about what truly matters. For Jobs, mediocre work done without conviction was its own kind of failure.
This speech has been heard by millions since 2005, and this particular passage endures because it asks a genuinely difficult question. Not what are you good at, or what pays well, but what do you believe is great work. That distinction, quiet as it seems, is the whole point.
