>From: "Grace Tiang *d.O.t.s.pf*" <gracetiang@hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: milkbottle49@yahoogroups.com
>To: milkbottle49@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: [milkbottle49] FW: [eguana_0506] 5 minutes worth of a nice read
>Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 18:04:14 +0800
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>*~Life is not a rehearsal. You don't get a second chance when you live.~*
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>From: "Lin Mingui" <u0303728@nus.edu.sg>
>Reply-To: eguana_0506@yahoogroups.com
>To:
><eguana_0506@yahoogroups.com>,<eguana_0304@yahoogroups.com>,<KRag2004@yahoogroups.com>,<KRag2005@yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: [eguana_0506] 5 minutes worth of a nice read
>Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 10:19:00 +0800
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>This is a bit old; anyways this is the Commencement address at Stanford
>University by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation
>Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. It is a quite a worthwhile read; and
>for those whose time are too precious, try to spare some time reading the
>last story (in blue fonts). I tot it was very niceee.
>
>
>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 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 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.
>
>�
>
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