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 other's 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 delivered these lines in his commencement address to Stanford University’s graduating class on June 12, 2005. In the speech he framed his advice through three personal stories—“connecting the dots,” “love and loss,” and “death”—drawing on experiences such as dropping out of Reed College, being forced out of Apple, and his recent cancer diagnosis. The quotation comes from the closing section, where Jobs urges graduates to resist external expectations and conventional “dogma,” and to make life choices guided by personal conviction rather than social pressure. It functions as a culminating exhortation to live deliberately in the face of life’s brevity.

The passage argues that authenticity is an ethical and practical imperative because life is finite. “Living someone else’s life” and “dogma” represent inherited scripts—career paths, social norms, and secondhand beliefs—that can substitute for self-knowledge. Jobs contrasts the “noise” of public opinion with an “inner voice,” suggesting that meaningful work and identity emerge from attentive intuition rather than conformity. The final claim—“Everything else is secondary”—reorders values: status, approval, and conventional success matter less than pursuing what one feels called to become. In the context of a commencement, it is both motivational counsel and a critique of passive, externally authored lives.

1) “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
2) “And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
3) “They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”