Story

I couldn’t tell her, just couldn’t say it. As much, I loved her, she loved her crush that much more. I was hurt, but I was also grateful for the whole hoard of love, I was taking with me that I can never forget. Those days, those nights. The laughter and madness in those chats. She chased after her crush so hard, that she was gone from my lives in the blink of an eye. She never turned back and I didn’t wait for her to. I love her. Along with her flaws and imperfections. There’s something special about her that I’ve always been thinking of. I still remember that moment when I just realized how much I love her. I have no chance with her, but I know she was my best lesson to have. Some romances are so legendary, they’re carved into history. Why its really that hard to love someone? Why we always fall in love with someone who can’t love us back?  Why love leaves a memory no one can steal? Why love is hard to find, hard to keep, and hard to forget? Why love that goes through the hardest trials and survives? Why love hurts if rejected or betrayed? Why fall in love to find the beauty of life? Why you can’t blame gravity for falling in love? Why a person in love accepts everything?   To ask why we fall in love is to ask why the leaves fall. And to ask how we stay in love is to ask how the trees stay.

Over Thinking

“Fear allows you to react to a potential threat in good time. Being too happy all the time means that you don’t think about potential problems. It’s hard to anticipate something you’re not thinking about. Thus, the ultra ­cheerful are at a disadvantage when they need to overcome adversity. This is especially true for rare or complex problems that are difficult to expect. People with anxiety are sometimes responding to a threat that doesn’t exist. But, the response means that their imagination is highly active. An active imagination keeps you safe from threats that other people might not pick up on.” Scientists have explained in the study that the part of the brain which manages threat perception showed “high levels of spontaneous activity” in people who are more stressed than others. A strong emotion such as fear allows a person to stress over and think extensively about potential threats compared to people who are perpetually happy. This fear allows a person to react faster to a threat, which often too cheerful people do not anticipate. Even for issues which are difficult to read at times, people who worry could be at an advantage over extremely happy people just by a margin of thinking more. Another surprising find of the study reveals that anxious people are more likely to have highly imaginative minds because they are always expecting non existent threats. Picking up on this train of thought, the same imaginative mind will pick up more easily on threats which will go unnoticed by many others 

Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the 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 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college 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 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 waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out 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 someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my 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 how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of 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 required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

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 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 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 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 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 10 years later, when we 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 this 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 college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

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 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. 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. 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. So at 30 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. 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 had 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 of 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. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene 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 hits 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 your work as it is for your lovers. 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. 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 until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I 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 — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Speech

Connecting The Dots Speech

-Steve Jobs 

Believe

 It’s one of the hardest choices in life to decide whether or not to continue fighting. Walk away or try harder, leave or stay. But in the end the things you didn’t do will hurt more than the ones you regret doing. It’ll be the what ifs that will always take your breath away when you have a spare minute to think, and you’ll wonder “what could’ve happened if I’d taken the chance?” It’ll be the thought that drives you insane. So start. Start now. Take that chance. Believe in yourself. You can do this. 

Friendship

I learned a lot about friendships. I lost people that were once my best friends. I lost old friendships that I thought would last beyond high school. People I once trusted ended up showing me the opposite. Although I lost those people, I also built more valuable relationships with the people who stayed. I kept the friends that really mattered. I gained stronger friendships with people who were there for me. I realized that besides family, I only have a few people I can truly rely on, but that’s okay. Having a huge group of friends isn’t that great when most can care less about you. In the end, having a few valuable friendships with people who really have your back is always worth so much more. 

70 Goals

1. Always Forgive yourself for your mistakes.
2. Always buy good shoes, tires, and sheets.
3. Always Look people in the eye when you thank them.
4. Always Admit it when you’re wrong.
5. Always Address everyone.
6. Always Hold your heroes to a high standard.
7. Always Give credit. Take blame.
8. Always Smile at strangers.
9. Always Make the little things count.
10. Always Keep your word.
11. Always Eat lunch with the kids.
12. Always Carry your mother’s bags. She carried you for nine months.
13. Always Make time for your mom on your birthday. It’s her special day, too.
14. Always An hour with grandparents is time well spent. Ask for advice when you need it.
15. Always use ‘we’ when referring to your home team or your government.
16. Always keep a picture of your first fish, first car, and first boy/girlfriend.
17. Always take a vacation of your cell phone, internet, and TV once a year.
18. Be kind. Everyone has a hard fight ahead of them.
19. Be patient with airport security. They’re just doing their jobs.
20. Be a good listener. Don’t just wait for your turn to talk.
21. Be cool to younger kids. Reputations are built over a lifetime.
22. Don’t stare.
23. Don’t be the talker in a movie.
24. Don’t make a scene.
25. Don’t get to choose your own nickname.
26. Don’t fill up on bread, no matter how good.
27. Don’t lose your cool. Especially at work.
28. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it.
29. Don’t mention sunburns. Believe me, they know.
30. Never lie to your doctor.
31. Never get your hair cut the day of a special event.
32. Never park in front of a bar.
33. Never answer the phone at the dinner table.
34. Never be the last one in the pool.
35. Never call someone before 9am or after 9pm.
36. Never cancel dinner plans by text message.
37. Never eat lunch at your desk if you can avoid it
38. Know the words to your national anthem.
39. Know at least one good joke.
40. Know how to cook one good meal.
41. Know when to ignore the camera.
42. Know the size of your boy/girlfriend’s clothes.
43. Know to drive a stick shift.
44. Know to change a tire.
45. If you offer to help don’t quit until the job is done.
46. If you’re staying more than one night, unpack.
47. If you’ve made your point, stop talking.
48. If you don’t understand, ask before it’s too late.
49. If you have the right of way, take it.
50. If a street performer makes you stop walking, you owe him a buck.
51. If you have to fight, punch first and punch hard.
52. Thank the bus driver.
53. Thank the host.
54. You are what you do, not what you say.
55. You won’t always be the strongest or the fastest. But you can be the toughest.
56. You only get one chance to notice a new haircut.
57. It’s okay to go to the movies by yourself.
58.  It’s never too late for an apology.
59. There best way to show thanks is to wear it. Even if it’s only once.
60. There is  handshake which beats an autograph.
61. There are plenty of ways to enter a pool. The stairs is not one of them.
62. There is nothing wrong with a plain t-shirt.
63. When entrusted with a secret, keep it.
64. When opening presents, no one likes a good guesser.
65. When you marry someone, remember you marry their entire family.
67. When you’re with new friends, don’t just talk about old friends.
68. When giving a thank you speech, short and sweet is best.
69. When you explaining something, be nice.
70. When you are alone, enjoy yourself.