Steve Jobs Commencement Speech Summary

In the speech “Steve Jobs Commencement Address to Stanford University, Class of 2005”, Apple CEO Steve Jobs provides his audience with personal experiences and the rough periods he went through in his early years before founding apple that helped him succeed. With the use of his stories Jobs creates a character that prevails through obstacles and manages to achieve his goals, which inspires his audience to look up to him and show that failure is sometimes necessary to succeed.
At the beginning of his speech, Steve Jobs begins describing his life with a series of stories that helped him reach his success, this helps Jobs create ethos because his audience will understand the hardships he went through to be where he is today, instead of just thinking of Jobs as the founder of Apple and not really knowing about the struggles he had to go through. In his early college days he dropped out of his regular classes. Jobs explains that his regular classes were not interesting to him and he didn’t believe they would help him succeed in the future, so he took up Calligraphy classes. For the time being Jobs was not

Jobs was fired from Apple back in 1985 because the board believed he was no longer useful to the company, in fact, they believed he was being detrimental to the business, he says “our visions of the future began to diverge and… our Board of Directors sided with him.” Jobs chose to talk about how he was fired from Apple, the company he had founded, because it reveals Job’s biggest failure, He had spent most of his adult life growing the company, only to have it taken away, yet Jobs pushed on and recovered it later on. This use of pathos strengthens the connection with his audience, and shows how someone so successful once reached rock bottom, yet managed to climb his way back up, and it inspires them to be like