Time & Perspective Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is selling rebellion in the most palatable packaging imaginable: the inspirational commencement address as a product demo for selfhood. The lines move like a keynote slide deck - short, rhythmic, built for applause - but the intent is strategic. He frames life as a scarce resource ("Your time is limited"), then positions conformity as the great hidden cost. The language of "dogma" and "noise" turns society into a bad interface: cluttered, default settings chosen by someone else, thoughts inherited like preinstalled software.

The subtext is classic Jobs: control your narrative with the same fierce editorial hand he brought to design. "Living someone else's life" isn't only about parents and peers; it's a warning against letting institutions, career ladders, and received prestige define the operating system. Calling dogma "the results of other people's thinking" is a neat rhetorical hack - it makes tradition sound lazy, like outsourcing. And "inner voice" is a carefully romantic phrase that smuggles in a brand-friendly individualism: intuition as the ultimate product feature.

Context matters. This is a man who built an empire on taste, persuasion, and mythmaking, speaking to graduates primed to fear wrong turns. The speech offers permission to choose a nonlinear path while quietly sanctifying the kind of conviction that, in practice, can look like stubbornness. It's motivational, yes, but also a cultural script from Silicon Valley: trust yourself, distrust the crowd, treat your life like a startup. The courage he asks for is less about purity and more about committing to a bet when the market of opinions turns volatile.