[Offtopic] Steve Jobs at Stanford
Mark Scott
msc at staff.luther.vic.edu.au
Sun Jul 3 20:59:19 EST 2005
I agree.
Life can be great if you do who you love, and love who you are doing.
or should that be whom?
Mark Scott
-----Original Message-----
From: offtopic-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Keith Richardson
Sent: Sun 7/3/2005 6:02 PM
To: Information Technology Teachers' Offtopic Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Offtopic] Steve Jobs at Stanford
Thank you Roland for one of the most reassuring stories I have read for
a long time.
Friends ask me "You are 60, why don't you retire?" I reply "I am having
too much fun thank you." And it is true. I once spent so much time
hating what I was doing (it didn't start that way, it just sort of crept
up on me) that when I experienced a Steve Jobs job closure, I thought
the world had ended. But now - wow!!!
Life can be great if you do what you love, and love what you are doing.
I do (most of the time!).
Thanks again Roland.
Ciao, Keith
On Sun, 3 Jul 2005 16:57:26 +1000, "Roland Gesthuizen"
<rge at westallsc.vic.edu.au> said:
> Here is a nice cross post from the QSITE-LAN. It is a fascinating life
> story
> if anybody is anybody is interested in a holiday read. Apologies but I
> cannot seem to find the source.
>
> Regards Roland
>
> ------------------------- ><8 snip snip -----------
>
> Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
>
> 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
>
> This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
> Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Commencement 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
> cent 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
> your 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.
>
> ------------------------- ><8 snip snip -----------
>
>
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Keith Richardson
Leibler Yavneh College
Elsternwick Ph (03)9528 4911
keithcr at fastmail.fm
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