The academic year is almost over and we want to take the opportunity to reflect on opportunities and future careers with our students. Our B2 First and C1 Advanced learners will listen to an inspiring speech and discuss the topics of success and failure. Our B1 Preliminary and B2 First students can talk about luck, fate and destiny while they practise different skills. Our A1 Movers and A2 Flyers students can improve their vocabulary related to work and professions while they have some fun. Happy teaching!

1. 1
May
The academic year is almost over and we want to take the opportunity to reflect on
opportunities and future careers with our students. Our B2 First and C1 Advanced learners
will listen to an inspiring speech and discuss the topics of success and failure. Our B1
Preliminary and B2 First students can talk about luck, fate and destiny while they practise
different skills. Our A1 Movers and A2 Flyers students can improve their vocabulary related to
work and professions while they have some fun. Happy teaching!
1. Keep looking, don’t settle ...............................................................................................................2
2. Connecting the dots.........................................................................................................................6
3. I want to be an astronaut!.............................................................................................................11
4. References......................................................................................................................................13

2. 2
1. Keep looking, don’t settle
Level: B2 First / C1 Advanced
Skills: speaking and reading
Interaction: whole class and individual activity
Classroom equipment: computer, Internet connection,
speakers, screen
Time: 50 minutes
Warm up (10’) – whole class activity
• What do you want to do when you grow up? / Is your current job your vocation? Why
(not)?
• Have you always known what you wanted to be?
• What aspects do you take into account when choosing a job?
• Have you ever had the impression that you had the opportunity to start over? Tell us
more about it.
Listening (25’) – individual activity
You will hear Steve Jobs giving a speech at Stanford University in 2005.
• Who was Steve Jobs?
• What was he famous for?
• Can you tell us anything about him?
• Do you know anything about Stanford University?
Watch from 5’35’’ to 15’04’’ and answer the questions. For questions 1 – 5, choose the answer
(A, B, or C) which fits best according to what you hear.

3. 3
Questions
1. How long did it take Steve Jobs and his colleague to make their company grow
from a 2- to a 4000-employee company?
a) Twenty years
b) Ten years
c) Thirty years
2. Why was Steve Jobs fired from Apple?
a) He made a serious mistake and the board of directors lost their confidence in
him.
b) He had a fight with a colleague.
c) His colleague and he had different plans for the future of the company and the
differences became too important.
3. What was his first reaction after being fired?
a) He thought about running away from the country.
b) He felt he had failed the previous generation of innovators.
c) He felt it was a fantastic opportunity to start again.
4. How did Steve Jobs return to Apple?
a) Apple admitted that they had made a mistake in light of Jobs’ success with other
companies.
b) Steve Jobs bought Apple thanks to the success of his other two companies.
c) One of the companies he owned at that time was purchased by Apple.

4. 4
5. What advice does Steve Jobs give?
a) To move to another business if you aren’t successful.
b) To keep looking for opportunities of success.
c) To choose a job you are passionate about.
Follow up! (10’) – whole class activity
• Do you agree with Steve Jobs’ view of life? Why (not)?
• Do you think it is a realistic opinion? Why (not)?
• The speech includes some vocabulary related to work. Can you find all the examples
of work lexis in the script below?
• Can you explain the following sentences?
o It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it.
o I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me
KEY
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life.
Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in (1)
ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with
over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier,
and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you
started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the
company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. (2) But then our visions of the
future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of
directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the
focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do
for a few months.(3) I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I
had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce
and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought
about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved
what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I
was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could
have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness
of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most
creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT,
another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become
my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story,"
and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
(4) In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the
technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene
and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was
awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in
the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was
that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for

5. 5
your lovers. (5) 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. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of
the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and
better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
WORK VOCAB
Work hard, employee, got fired (get fired), start(ed), run a company, board of directors,
drop(ped) the baton, successful,

6. 6
2. Connecting the dots
Level: B1 Preliminary / B2 First
Skills: reading, speaking and listening
Interaction: whole class and paired activity
Classroom equipment: computer, Internet connection,
speakers, screen
Time: 50 minutes
Warm up (10’) – whole class
• Do you believe in fate / destiny? Why (not)?
• Are you a superstitious person? Why (not)?
• Do you do anything in particular or have any habits when you are nervous or in the
middle of an important event?
• Why do you think famous sportspeople such as Rafael Nadal have these routines?
Reading and Speaking (10’) – in pairs / whole class activity
Have a look at these sayings. What do they mean? Do you agree or disagree? Which of
them do you agree / disagree most with? Why?
Fate is for those too weak to determine their own destiny.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their
own minds.
I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter
what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we
do nothing.
What separates the winners from the losers is how a
person reacts to each new twist of fate.

7. 7
Adapted from: Amisko Group (2021) & Wise Sayings (2021).
Speaking and Listening (15’) – in pairs / whole class activity
You will hear Steve Jobs giving a speech at Stanford University in 2005.
• Who was Steve Jobs?
• What was he famous for?
• Can you tell us anything about him?
• Do you know anything about Stanford University?
Watch from the beginning to 5’35’’. For questions 1 – 10, complete the sentences with the
word(s) you hear.
If you can't change your fate, change your attitude.
When luck joins in the game, cleverness scores double.
Third time lucky.
Luck is a disease for which hard work is the only remedy.
Good luck is a lazy man’s estimate of a worker’s
success.

8. 8
1. Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the
finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this
2. is the (0) closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
3. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three
4. stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
5. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a
6. drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really (1) __________. So why did
7. I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed
8. graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly
9. that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be
10. adopted at birth by a (2) __________ and his wife, except that when I popped out,
11. they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were
12. on a (3) __________ list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an
13. unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother
14. (4) __________ later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my
15. father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption
16. papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would
17. go to college. This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to
18. college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and
19. all of my (5) __________ parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After
20. six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,
21. and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was,
22. spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out
23. and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back,
24. it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop
25. taking the (6) __________ classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on
26. the ones that looked far more interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm
27. room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent
28. deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday
29. night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of
30. what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition (7) __________ to be
31. priceless later on. Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered
32. perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every
33. poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had
34. dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy

9. 9
35. class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about
36. varying the amount of (8) __________ between different letter combinations, about
37. what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a
38. way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope
39. of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we (9) __________ the
40. first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac.
41. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that
42. single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
43. proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no
44. personal computer would have them.
45. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and
46. personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
47. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college,
48. but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect
49. the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have
50. to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in
51. something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots
52. will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your (10) __________,
53. even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
Follow-up (15’) – whole class activity
• Have a look at the words in bold in the text above. Can you explain their meaning?
• Steve Jobs recommends trusting that the dots will connect, what does he mean by
that?
KEY
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest
universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the (0) closest
I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The
first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in
for another eighteen months or so before I really (1) quit. So why did I drop out? It started
before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she
decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college
graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a (2) lawyer and his wife,
except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
So my parents, who were on a (3) waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking,
"We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological
mother (4) found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father
had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only
relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose
a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my (5) working-class parents'
savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help
me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.
So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time,
but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I
could stop taking the (6) required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the
ones that looked far more interesting.

10. 10
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I
returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven
miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna
temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition (7)
turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-
calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided
to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of (8) space between different letter combinations, about
what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that
science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when
we (9) were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed
it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped
in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal
computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and
personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it
was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots
looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the
dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny,
life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you
the confidence to follow your (10) heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and
that will make all the difference.

11. 11
3. I want to be an astronaut!
Level: A1 Movers / A2 Flyers
Skills: speaking and writing
Interaction: whole class, individual and paired activity
Classroom equipment: computer, Internet connection,
speakers, screen
Time: 55 minutes
Warm up (10’) – whole class activity
• What would you like to be when you grow up? Why?
• What does your dad / mum / aunt / uncle do?
Vocabulary (10’) – in pairs
Find 20 professions in the wordsearch.
Speaking (10’) – whole class activity
Tell me about a profession you like. Don’t say which one it is. You have to say three things
about it. Your classmates will have to guess.

12. 12
Writing (10’) – Individual activity
How do you spell it? Play the game and practise your spelling.
Speaking (15’) – whole class activity
Interview a person whose job inspires you or use the Internet to find out about a person whose
job has been important. Write some notes and give a short presentation about him / her.
Name: ____________________________
Job: ____________________________
What does s/he do?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Where does s/he work?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
Why is this job important?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________

13. 13
4. References
Amisko Group (2021). Luck Proverbs. Available at: https://proverbicals.com/luck-is-loaned-
not-owned [Accessed 24th April 2021].
Lacy, K. (2019). Aerial Photo of Empty Meandering Road In Between Forest. [image/jpeg]
Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/aerial-photo-of-empty-meandering-road-
in-between-forest-2876511/ [Accessed 30th April 2021].
Mei, L. (2016). Fushimi Inari Shrine path. [image/jpeg] Available at:
https://unsplash.com/photos/NYyCqdBOKwc [Accessed 30th April 2021].
Pixabay. (2016). Blue Skies. [image/jpeg] Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-
skies-53594/ [Accessed 30th April 2021].
Sticker Mule. (2017). No title. [image/jpeg] Available at:
https://unsplash.com/photos/FqkBXo2Nkq0/info [Accessed 30th April 2021].
Wise Sayings (2021). Fate Sayings and Quotes. Available at:
https://www.wisesayings.com/fate-quotes/ [Accessed 24th April 2021].
Wordwall, (2021). Work. Available at: https://wordwall.net/resource/15513497/work
[Accessed 30th April 2021].
Youtube, D. (2005). Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc [Accessed 24th April 2021].