Posted by pinkeye on July 11, 2005, at 20:32:43
In reply to Plus, you would make an excellent therapist anyday » Tamar, posted by pinkeye on July 11, 2005, at 20:30:09
(REad this - it is a somewhat unformatted, but it is a good read).
Steve Jobs Stanford University Commencement Speech,
> June 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 san 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
> ten 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, its
> 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 backwards ten
> 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. 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 4000 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 worlds 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 retuned 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 its 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 other's 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 1960's, 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.
>
poster:pinkeye
thread:526327
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050706/msgs/526402.html