#66 - How to Give a Speech That Will Go Viral

Welcome to the Communication Mentor Podcast.

This is your host, Chris Miller.

The purpose of this podcast is for us to become better communicators so that we can live fuller lives, grow in our careers and be more resilient to life stress.

We believe that life is better when you talk to people and that one of the most important things we can do is to figure out how to best articulate our thought.

In this episode, we will be doing something that we have never done on the podcast.

We are going to be listening to the most watched speech on the entire YouTube platform.

It is the Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

And we are essentially going to see what we can take from this speech and apply it to ourselves.

One of the best ways to become a better public speaker is to learn from the people who have done it well.

I'm going to turn my microphone down and start playing this speech.

This is a new format.

If you like this format, I'd love for you to message TalkToPeoplePodcast at gmail.com or reach out on Instagram or something because I could do it again.

But if you don't like it, feel free to just give it a five minute try and you can always hop off.

And then I'll catch you for Thursday's episode.

I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.

And truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life.

That's it, no big deal, just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.

So why'd I drop out?

It started before I was born.

My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student and she decided to put me up for adoption.

She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, we've got an unexpected baby boy.

Do you want him?

They said, of course.

My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.

She refused to sign the final adoption papers.

She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life.

And 17 years later, I did go to college.

But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford.

And all of my working class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.

After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.

So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.

It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic.

I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms.

I returned coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buy food with.

And I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

I loved it.

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.

Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed.

Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

And we designed it all into the Mac.

It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward.

You can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.

And that will make all the difference.

Okay, so I forgot to stop it at the intro.

So let's quickly talk about the intro and then let's talk about that first point.

The very beginning, the intro, he established his relatability with the audience.

Stanford's one of the top universities.

So Steve Jobs really is an icon to them.

So he already has a lot of credibility, but he says, I'm kind of intimidated by you all because I didn't graduate college.

It's a joke.

Obviously he did really well.

But then he introduced his speech, the structure of his speech by saying, I'm just gonna share three simple stories.

We love stories.

Human beings are all about stories.

I think this is a great way to give a speech.

If you ever give a large platform speech like this is to start off with simple stories.

The first story, he has a narrative from beginning, middle to end, talking about being adopted, talking about going to college, and then talking about coming up with the Mac computer.

He uses a supporting story about the font and how he dropped into a specific class.

And due to that class, he was then able to create the font for the MacBook.

He uses a ton of humor.

He talks about the best thing he's ever done was dropping out and how Windows copies Mac.

The audience loves it.

But after he gives the story, then he gives the takeaway.

The takeaway being, you can't connect the dots looking forward.

You can only connect them looking backward.

So the structure of giving a simple story, using humor inside the story, using narrative inside the story, and then he also emphasizes the value of education, and he creates a little bit of tension there because his parents really valued education, but then he went and he dropped out of school.

So now let's listen to story two.

What to do early in life.

Was and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20.

We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.

We just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned 30, and then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started?

Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well.

But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out.

When we did, our board of directors sided with him.

And so at 30, I was out, and very publicly out.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months.

I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.

I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce, and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me.

I still loved what I did.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.

I'd been rejected, but I was still in love.

And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named Next, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.

And Loreen and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.

It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

Sometimes life's gonna hit you in the head with a brick.

Don't lose faith.

I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.

Your work is gonna fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.

As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

So keep looking, don't settle.

Look at how he finished that.

He said, keep looking, don't settle.

He pauses really well.

Also his pacing, he has very consistent pacing throughout the whole entire part.

You can notice that his word choice, he has yet to have a word that the average person would not understand.

And he shares things like, you've got to find what you love.

The only way to do great work.

Both these things are absolutes.

He's speaking with certainty, they're statements.

So he speaks with a lot of conviction, and that is heard throughout the whole entire audience.

And the best way to do this is to speak about stuff that you actually believe in.

If you can tell people the only way to do this is blank, people are going to listen.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, if you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.

It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I've 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?

And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

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.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

You are already naked.

There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer.

I had a scan at 7.30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

I didn't even know what a pancreas was.

The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.

It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.

It means to say your goodbyes.

I live with that diagnosis all day.

Later that evening, I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

I had the surgery, and thankfully, I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.

Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.

No one wants to die.

Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

And yet, death is the destination we all share.

No one has ever escaped it.

And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.

It's life's change agent.

It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Right now, the new is you.

But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true.

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 others' 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.

So sharing the stories gives us the personal connection that opens us the highway, that opens up the highway for him then to share the message that he wants to share.

This story three is such a great example of like the vulnerability opening up for the message to resonate because he gets incredibly vulnerable talking about close encounter with death whenever he was diagnosed with cancer.

And with such detail, he talks about a biopsy with the needle going into the stomach and into the pancreas and the oncologist crying.

It's just incredibly special, like looking at this speech.

I know Steve Jobs wasn't the best guy.

Apparently, in the workforce, he didn't treat people the best.

But you have to admit he gave a good speech.

Let's see how he ends it.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation.

It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park.

And he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing.

So it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras.

It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along.

It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stuart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog.

And then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.

It was the mid 1970s, and I was your age.

On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

Beneath it were the words, stay hungry, stay foolish.

It was their farewell message as they signed off, stay hungry, stay foolish.

And I have always wished that for myself.

And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all very much.

What stood out to the speech?

The first thing was that he used simple words and phrases.

It was easily understandable.

The second thing was he shared stories with details.

It's relatable, and not only were the stories detailed, but they were also vulnerable.

And then the last thing was he shares actionable messages after each takeaway.

And these messages are spoken with conviction.

If you tell people to do certain things and then you speak that with conviction, that resonates so heavily with us.

So as you are thinking about giving a speech, think about these things.

Make sure that you maintain simplicity.

You don't want to use big words unless you absolutely have to.

Second, make sure you share story.

Humans are storytelling creatures.

How did this happen and where did this go?

Also, whenever you share personal stories, you separate yourself from everybody else because no one else has lived your exact life.

And then the third thing, you have to know what you believe in and you have to know what will actually work.

And then sharing that wisdom with conviction.

Keep it simple, have some detailed stories, and then speak with conviction.

If this episode added you any value, I'd love for you to leave a review.

I'll be releasing a new episode on Thursday.

And without further ado, we'll see you next time, folks.