Today sick after a week I joined my daily activities and doing my daily news search found 2 post on the blog info links-t that inspired me .
I have the honor to be here with you in one of the best universities worldwide. Truth be told, I never graduated. Indeed, this is the closest I've been to a college graduation.
Today I tell you three stories from my life.
Nothing Special, just three stories
The first story talks about connecting the dots. "
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months. Then I went wandering around another 18 months or so before I really quit.
So why leave?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young student and single, and decided to put me up for adoption. She had very strongly that I would take would have to be university graduates. So everything is ready for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Just when I was born decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call at midnight asking: We have an unexpected baby boy do you want? "Of course" they said.
My biological mother later found out that my mother had no college degree, and my father had never graduated from high school, so he refused to sign the adoption papers. Only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I went to college. In a careless manner, I chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all the savings of my parents, working class, were spent on my tuition.
After six months, did not see any purpose. I had no idea I wanted to do with my life. And even less of how college was going to help me find out. And I was spending all the money my parents had throughout his life. So I decided to drop out and trust that things would work out.
At the time I was afraid, but in retrospect was one of the best decisions I ever made. At the time I left, but I was no longer the required classes that did not interest me. I started to get into ones that looked interesting. It was idyllic. I had no room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. Returned bottles of Coca-Cola for 5 cents a pack to raise money for food, and walked more than 10km on Sunday night, to eat well once a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved, and many things that I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
I'll give an example: At the time
Reed College offered what was perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. And you could see everywhere on campus, all posters. Even the labels of the drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphy.
Because I had registered and had no classes, I decided to attend a calligraphy class to learn how to. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying spaces between letters, about what makes a really big font. It was subtly beautiful, historical, artistically, in a way that science can not 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 were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed the Mac with that in its essence. 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 characters. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them if it had never decided to resign. There would be entered in on that calligraphy class and personal 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 class, but it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again:
can not connect the dots looking forward, you can only back, so I have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future. You have to trust in something. Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will join will give you the confidence to trust your heart. This approach has never let me shot and made a difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
was lucky: I learned early in life what he wanted most do. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20 years. We worked hard and in ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us a company worth U.S. $ 2mil million and 4,000 employees. Just a year ago we released our finest creation, the Macintosh, and I had just turned 30 and 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 during the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and finally, we turn away completely. When we did, our board of directors sided with him.
So at 30 I was outside, and very publicly. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really do not know what to do for some months. Felt that I had left out the previous generation of entrepreneurs who had dropped the baton at the time that passed me.
I met with David Packard (HP) and Bob Noyce (Intel) and tried to apologize for having screwed up so much. It was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from Silicon Valley, but something began to dawn on me. Even
loved what I did, and the result of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. Had been rejected, but still was in love. So I decided to start over. I do not see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing I ever could have happened. He changed the weight of success by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. Over 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 first feature film computer-animated Toy Story. Now is the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple. The technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurenne and I have a wonderful family.
I'm sure none of this would have happened if I had not been fired from Apple. I think it was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life gives you over the head with a brick.
not lose faith. I am convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.
You have to find what you love, and this applies to both your work and for your loved ones. The work will fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what they consider a great job. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
If you have not found, keep looking.
Do not settle.
Like everything that has to do with the heart, you'll know when you've found. And like any great relationship, things get better and better as the years go, so keep looking until you find it.
Do not settle.
My third story is about death. When I
17 years I read a quote that went something like: If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll be right.
I checked and since then, during the past 33 years, every morning I looked in the mirror and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I do today?
And if the answer is NO for too many days in a row, you'd know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almost everything: the expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment fade or failure before death, leaving only what is truly important. Remember
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. Already
naked.
There is no reason not to follow your heart.
almost a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 AM, and it clearly showed a tumor in the pancreas.
I did not even know it was the pancreas.
The doctors told me this was almost certainly that it was an incurable cancer and that my life expectancy was 3 to 6 months.
My doctor advised me to go to go home and get my business closed.
medical form to say: Prepare to die.
means you have to tell your kids in a few months what would you say in ten years.
means to make sure everything is tied, securely tied, so that everything is as easy as possible for your family.
means saying goodbye.
a day I lived with that diagnosis. Then, late in the afternoon, I had a biopsy stuck an endoscope down the throat through the stomach and duodenum. Pancreas pricked with a needle to get some tumor cells. I was sedated, but my wife was there. He said that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor began to mourn. Because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had surgery and I'm fine.
This is the closest I've been to facing death and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades.
Having lived through it, I can now say that with more certainty: The death was to me a useful concept, but purely intellectual.
Nobody wants to die, even people who want to go to heaven do not want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and it has to be because the death is possibly the best invention of life.
is the agent of change in life. Remove the old to make way for the new.
Right now the new is you, but someday not too long, gradually, they will become the old and shall be removed.
Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so do not waste it living someone else's life. Do not be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of the thinking of others.
not let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Some so they know what you really want to be, and everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog (Catalog of all the earth), one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park. And brought to life with his poetic touch. It was the late 60's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was like Google in paperback form, 30 years before Google came along.
was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and when the time came, took one last issue. That was in mid 70's and I was his age. In the back of their latest issue had a picture of a country road early in the morning. The kind of road you might find yourself hitchhiking if you are adventurous. Beneath it were the words "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish."
was his last farewell message: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.
And I always wished that for myself.
And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that:
Stay Hungry, Stay crazy.
via infoune-t
