Steve Jobs on varied experiences, creativity, and resisting complacency

Walt Disney's LSD use inspired Fantasia, according to Jobs, who once again cited it as a formative experience.

He stressed that the story was true, using it to argue that creative breakthroughs can come from unusual life experiences.

According to Jobs, the key pattern among the innovators he had studied was that they drew on a wide range of experiences when facing a problem or dilemma.

Pressure to pick one clear direction will be strong for students, and pushing back means sitting over lunch with people who think differently.

Growing up, Jobs assumed the world happened outside him and that his task was to find his place in it.

As he met the people actually running things, he found they were not very different from ordinary people, though some might have slightly better judgment in certain areas.

Jobs said that around age 25 or 30 people inherit a responsibility to act as guardians of the Earth for future generations, and that the current generation is doing an extremely poor job of it.

The chance the planet stays intact through the audience's natural lifetimes is not high, and it is fairly dismal; his own future children, he hoped, would grow up to sit and listen to people like the audience.

Jobs opened with a joke that his mind was still somewhere over Iowa after just arriving that afternoon.

Jobs recounted talking with a boy named Ralph, about 11 or 12, who uses an Apple, and describing his own first computer experience.

As a child he had to type out a program, carry stacks of cards to a computer center, and wait half an hour for a result, which he called prehistoric compared with today. Ralph did not understand this at all.

They take the last generation's accomplishments for granted, and they are still not happy.

The patriotic "God bless America" messages were meant to help, Jobs hoped, but they should not dull the students into accepting things as they are.

He wanted them to keep their idealism and the sense that the status quo is not good enough, because they are citizens of a world that badly needs their idealism and help.

Rags-to-riches stories dominate the event, and listeners should be careful with that pattern, since many successful people never made much money and are not on stage.

Many people who have been very successful in other ways are absent, some may not have made much money, and the audience should listen to them closely too.

Intelligence, Jobs has concluded after thinking about it, is largely memory plus a lot of ability to zoom out.

Seeing the whole picture makes connections feel obvious to bright people, and that is why they feel guilty stating obvious things that others reward with dumb awards.

To connect two experiences, a person must not share the same experiences as everyone else, Jobs argued, or the connections will be the same and nothing new will emerge.

The passage then tells listeners to fall in love with two people at once, and adds a claim that Walt Disney took LSD, closing with the question "Do you know that?"