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Verse:“‘And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” —Luke 12:19, 20, NIV
Imagine it is Sunday, June 12, 2005, and you are at Stanford Stadium for Stanford University’s 114th commencement.
Surprisingly, the keynote speech is being delivered by a guest speaker who doesn’t even have a college degree! Just a few years ago, he was forced out of the company he helped found, and, recently, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
He just tells three stories from his own life experiences, yet his fifteen-minute speech is destined to become one of the most famous discourses ever presented at that prestigious university. Who was the speaker? You may already know it was Steve Jobs (1955–2011), the chief executive officer and cofounder of Apple and Pixar Animation Studios. The American journalist Walter Isaacson described him as “a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.” He was the main conceptualizer of several Apple products, including iMacs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes. In his Stanford speech, Jobs said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything —all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure— these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” He confessed, “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’” He died on October 5, 2011, at only fifty-six years old, but he left an extremely rich technological legacy.
As urged by Ellen White, “We should watch and work and pray as though this were the last day that would be granted us. How intensely earnest, then, would be our life. How closely would we follow Jesus in all our words and deeds.” What changes can you make in your life to best implement this advice?