The only way to do great work is to love what you do

These words are Steve Jobs's own, spoken in the second of the three stories — "love and loss" — in his commencement address to Stanford University's graduating class on June 12, 2005. The line runs unbroken in Stanford's official text of the speech: "Your work is going to 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." It is not a later paraphrase of his sentiment but a verbatim clause preserved in Stanford's published transcript and in the widely circulated video recording, and independent transcriptions reproduce it identically. As a freestanding aphorism it usually drops the opening "And," which is the only difference between the popular version and the original. We found no earlier source and no competing author; the quote's fame flows directly from this speech — the most-watched commencement address on record — and its authorship is beyond reasonable doubt.