Steve Jobs Speech Analysis

During his talk at Stanford’s 2015 graduation Ceremony, Steve Jobs gives the students very helpful advice about being confident and staying positive throughout life. Because he is talking to college graduates who are about to enter the real world, it is good that he told them about his own experiences, because they can hear about a successful person’s struggles. During his speech, he talks about how he had to sell bottles to be able to afford dinner, had to walk 7 miles to get a good meal once a week, and had to temporarily deal with the fact that he had an incurable cancer. These examples of hardship help him connect with the students who are feeling stressed out about taking a big step in their adult lives and who are unsure about what they
First, even though his story about having to sell bottles for food and having to walk 7 miles one a week for good food was interesting, he could have talked a little more about the subject. Not having enough money for food and having to work extra hard to obtain it could be soon be relatable to many graduates if they do not get a good start out of college, but he decides to only mention this. He could have talked about it a little more and talked about the extra work he put in, be instead he decided to talk more about other subjects including dropping out of college and death. Even though the outcome of these events are stronger, the events themselves are not necessarily relatable. There are very few college students who have had near death experiences and there was most likely no one at his speech who was a college dropout. These stories may affect the listeners emotionally, but if they can not picture these events happening to themselves, they will just think that neither of these will happen to them and it is just other people. If people do not have a personal connection to what they are being told about, the speeches argument will lose a lot of its power. Another thing that he could have changed is that all of his failures end up leading to success in the distant future. This may be nice to hear if all that is wanted is assurance of the future, but if a person has recently had something bad happen in their life, they might want assurance for the near future. Even if a person believes everything that Steve Jobs says, they may also want to hear more about how he pushed through the bad times. He talks a lot about the events when they took place and what happened because of the events, but he never talked about how he got from point a to point b. If the listeners heard more about how he persevered to get through the hard times,