Steve Jobs: “Death Is Very Likely The Best Single Invention Of Life. It Is Life’s Change Agent.”

John Brownlee (6:10 pm PDT, Oct 05 2011)

Steve Jobs: “Death Is Very Likely The Best Single Invention Of Life. It Is Life’s Change Agent.”

“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. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

- Steve Jobs at the Stanford University commencement address in 2005

Beautiful. Here’s the video:

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8 comments »

  • http://twitter.com/goutam03 goutam

    That was one of the most inspiring 2 paragraphs I have ever read!
    Thanks Mr. Jobs

  • David

    Amazing words…

  • Davidbailie

    Now of we could all just remember those words going forward, what an amazing place we’d all live in.

  • http://www.facebook.com/bernardosiqueira Bernardo Siqueira

    Absolutely amazing words.

  • salsa037

    Jesus Christ actually defeated death and arose the 3rd day.

    • eddy20385

      salsa037 – that’s a belief in a story that not everyone agrees to believe. Reality is always now, not a was or a will be. Beyond belief, faith and hope there is certitude. Look around and you’ll see quite clearly that “human beings” are actually never being but coming and leaving. No one has ever defeated death because only life lives, having no beginning and no end life simply IS. The rest is all a story apparently happening within the context of life. The question is, who or what are you in the absence of all stories?

    • Mud3907

      So they say……

  • Cyork2

    Photo credit should go to my friend, Ryan Katsanes, a photographer out of Vancouver, Wa.

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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