Remembering That You Are Going To

This is from the third section of Jobs' Stanford University commencement address on June 12, 2005 — the section he called "Death." He disclosed publicly for the first time that day that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, had been told initially it was incurable, and that his doctors had advised him to prepare to die. The diagnosis proved to be a rarer, operable form, but the experience of facing mortality convinced him that fear of loss is the single largest obstacle to living authentically. This passage became one of the most widely quoted sections of the speech.