Re: Off Topic Steve Jobs at Stanford speech

Thanks, Bill. Enjoy reading this :-)


In Christ's love and service,

Andrew

--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Board-Certified Cardiologist

**
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(2) http://makeashorterlink.com/?W13A4250B
(3) http://makeashorterlink.com/?X1C62661A
(4) http://makeashorterlink.com/?U1E13130A
(5) http://makeashorterlink.com/?K6F72510A
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(7) http://makeashorterlink.com/?I22222129

William Wagner wrote:
>
> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152625&cid=12810404
>
> The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
> We are not responsible for them in any way.
> Transcript of Jobs' commencement speech (Score:5, Informative)
> by trudyscousin (258684) on Tuesday June 14, @02:27AM (#12810404)
>
> 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 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
> 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
> 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've got
> an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My
> biological mother 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 navely 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 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 required classes that
> didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far
> more 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 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 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 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, 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
> heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make
> all the difference.
>
> 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 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. 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. 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.
>
> 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 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, 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.
>
> 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It
> means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the
> next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure
> that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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's 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's 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, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was
> created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,
> and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late
> Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came
> along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
> Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth
> Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final
> issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
>
> Progress was all right. Only it went on too long. -- James Thurber
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>
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