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How Steve Jobs Wrote the Greatest Commencement Speech Ever


Back in 2005, Jobs spent months trying to figure out what to say to Stanford’s graduates. Newly released materials show how he went from hopelessly flailing to delivering a talk for the ages.

In early June 2005, Steve Jobs emailed his friend Michael Hawley a draft of a speech he had agreed to deliver to Stanford University’s graduating class in a few days. When his dad, Tom Porter, brought Spencer to work one day, the story goes, Pixar auteur John Lasseter became entranced by the toddler’s dimensions relative to his father’s and got the idea for a baby lamp. Onstage in San Francisco that day, Jobs was masterful, stalking the stage in alpha fashion, explaining a new phenomenon called podcasting (“We see it as the hottest thing going in radio”) and the Macintosh’s switch from PowerPC to Intel processors.

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