Steve Jobs' speech at the Stanford Commencement is a short speech which aims to give pieces of advice for students graduating from college and entering the world of work. Throughout the speech, Jobs combines his on insight with stories and anecdotes from his own life. Each of these anecdotes are designed to express a specific life lesson that Jobs has learned, and which he wishes to impart to his audience. A significant part of the rhetoric of the speech stems from Jobs's ability to use his own life experience to contextualize his own message. Throughout, this is combined with an ability to remain understated, and to make this understatement an integral of the manner in which his points are made and receiver. Most importantly, Jobs consistently makes use of a dissonance between his on status as arguably the world's most famous entrepreneur and the humility with which he makes his statements. It is this consistent use of dissonance which forms the most consistent rhetorical strategy in Jobs' speech as a whole. …show more content…
This statement of humility is immediately brought into conflict with the fact that the audience to whom he is speaking is evidently aware of the fact that Jobs runs Apple and that, as a result, he is an archetype for self-made success. By opening with the statement that he never graduated and is, in effect, less educated than his audience, Jobs makes use of both his status and the objective facts of his life. His own “failure” is transfigured in the rhetoric of the speech by the fact that both he and the audience are intimately aware that he has gone on to achieve great success. Crucial to each of the points that Jobs makes in his speech is the awareness that any seeming failure can be seen to play a part in the narrative of an infamous success