Important Long Article (7-10 min)
Success Secrets and Motivation from Steve Jobs of Apple
I want to invite you to read the message below from Steve Jobs of Apple that he delivered to the students of Stanford University in California, USA (at the bottom of this page you'll find link to watch and listen to this message on the YouTube.com).
IMPORTANT: Even if you want to read just one article from me, read this article because it is so important. It will motivate you to achieve more success in your life.
-- start of Steve Job's talk ------
"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 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 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."
-- end of Steve Job's talk ------
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Facts of faith
VATICAN - “You heard it said, but I say to you …” - intervention by Prof. Michele Loconsole - Jesus the Jew: n authentic historic discovery or a storicist reduction?
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - This month Kos magazine, published by San Raffaele, Milan, and edited by don Luigi Maria Verzè, dedicated a whole issue to the figure of Jesus the Jew, with authoritative contributions. The aim was to investigate the complex but simple personality of the most important 'man' in the history of humanity, Jesus of Nazareth. The authors of the articles included Gianfranco Ravasi, Magdi Cristiano Allam, Ornella Melogli, Simonetta Della Seta and Ermanno Olmi. The contribution of the latter, a well known film director of many films on Jesus and Christianity, was seen commented in a widely read Italian national newspaper under the title “I love Jesus more than God because he taught me to be free ”.
Before commenting on the article I take the opportunity to explain what struck me about this review. I think it is now clear, that historical, cultural and theological investigation on the person of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years after his birth is far from completion. Indeed year after year bibliography produced all over the world on this fascinating subject continues to grow. A growth which intensfied particularly following Vatican II, but especially with Pope Benedict XVI, who devoted two lengthy volumes to the Jesus of the Gospels (the first, Jesus of Nazareth 2007), is assuming exceptional dimensions. In fact after almost 50 years of positions taken by Jewish essayists and historians on the person of Jesus of Nazareth, from beginning of the last century onwards, only in recent years have we seen an organic “Catholic” answer to the happy, but in my opinion partial, Jewish claim on the fathomless Mystery surrounding the Teacher from Galilee.
Returning to Olmi, I was pleased to note that he too contributed to the massive mosaic documenting the historicity of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, of which Christianity of the 3rd millennium has such great need. I say during centuries, at least since the Enlightenment, the historic person of the founder of Christianity became blurred and faded, causing a series of misunderstandings and mistake and not only among Protestant Christians– most affected by this evanescence -, but even among Catholics. A crisis from which the whole of Christianity is striving to recover, thanks to authoritative studies of Jewish researchers and though the teachings of the recent Pontiffs– principally Benedict XVI who has this theme deeply at heart–, and thanks to numerous studies by Catholic and secular authors. A chorus on the historic data amply confirms the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish Rabbi and the founder of the world's most widespread religion.
Of course, like all “fashions” this can have its risks. The first and perhaps the most serious is that the Jewish identity of Jesus may not be understood as a characteristic which connects Him with Judaism in the strict sense. Jesus was undoubtedly a Jew and always will be, but this was precisely why he criticised, as the Rabbi he was, the Judaism of his day, bringing to completion and to perfection what had been announced by the prophets of Israel; He restored the originality of the message which God entrusted to the Patriarchs with numerous different Revelations recorded in the Old Testament. What Jesus did essentially was to connect the ancient revelation to Abraham, with his own person, human and divine which recapitulated in itself that salvation which God inaugurated with Abraham. A soldering achieved after encountering, teaching and in some cases, converting, some followers of the composite Jewish thought of the times, which we know was remodelled to meet legalistic and nationalist criteria which had emerged after the Mosaic experience and above all after the exile in Babylon.
The second risk, is only apparently less dangerous. The fact that many intellectuals, religious and non, Jews and Catholics, atheists and indifferent are rediscovering the historic dimension of Jesus of Nazareth, is a double edged sword. Although on everyone's lips, it is also true that the terms used are often approximate, exaggeratedly personal, relativist and sentimental. You cannot make Jesus say something He never ever said, or worse, precisely because he is an historical personage, the clear and simple message which he addressed first of all to the Jews and through them to all humanity. He said several times that He was the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity: true man but also true God and therefore God in person. Things being thus, the Jews cannot reduce his historical message to that of a prophet or a Rabbi, however authoritative, and others cannot say “I love Jesus more than God”. Jesus is God and to affirm the contrary means to misunderstand his message or distort it.
In the valid article by Olmi interesting parts reveal a rediscovered and more profound friendship with Jesus; a most deserving fact, but in no few parts - as we see in many other testimonies which ride the fortunate mode of the historic dimension of Jesus of Nazareth, sad to say often the work of distinguished experts in History of world religions– what is distorted, emptied and relativised is precisely Jesus' way of thinking and acting. How can one believe in Jesus, the Son of God, and question the virginity of his mother Mary? Or say I love men more than God and that this is what God wants? Or say that Jesus, the Verb made flesh par excellence, came not to teach us the Word of God, understood as words pronounced, instead he came as the Word of God to live human life? How can they compare the teachings of Jesus with those of Tolstoj or Gandhi, all figures, models, proposals for life? And ultimately, that you can be there His disciple without “getting up on the cross"?
Remarks which on the one hand communicate an essence more than a form of religiosity of which men and women today have such dire need, on the other deny the unicity and specificity Jesus' incarnation, mission, death and resurrection. So study and rediscovery of the Jesus of history and his Jewish identity, root and foundation of Christianity, an historical event not an ideology, is to be encouraged, but it is intellectually essential to avoid the mistake of relativising or bending Jesus of Nazareth, hypostasis of the Trinity, with all the weight of this statement, to one's own personal needs, even if this were to be done in good faith. (Agenzia Fides 27/6/2008)
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - This month Kos magazine, published by San Raffaele, Milan, and edited by don Luigi Maria Verzè, dedicated a whole issue to the figure of Jesus the Jew, with authoritative contributions. The aim was to investigate the complex but simple personality of the most important 'man' in the history of humanity, Jesus of Nazareth. The authors of the articles included Gianfranco Ravasi, Magdi Cristiano Allam, Ornella Melogli, Simonetta Della Seta and Ermanno Olmi. The contribution of the latter, a well known film director of many films on Jesus and Christianity, was seen commented in a widely read Italian national newspaper under the title “I love Jesus more than God because he taught me to be free ”.
Before commenting on the article I take the opportunity to explain what struck me about this review. I think it is now clear, that historical, cultural and theological investigation on the person of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years after his birth is far from completion. Indeed year after year bibliography produced all over the world on this fascinating subject continues to grow. A growth which intensfied particularly following Vatican II, but especially with Pope Benedict XVI, who devoted two lengthy volumes to the Jesus of the Gospels (the first, Jesus of Nazareth 2007), is assuming exceptional dimensions. In fact after almost 50 years of positions taken by Jewish essayists and historians on the person of Jesus of Nazareth, from beginning of the last century onwards, only in recent years have we seen an organic “Catholic” answer to the happy, but in my opinion partial, Jewish claim on the fathomless Mystery surrounding the Teacher from Galilee.
Returning to Olmi, I was pleased to note that he too contributed to the massive mosaic documenting the historicity of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, of which Christianity of the 3rd millennium has such great need. I say during centuries, at least since the Enlightenment, the historic person of the founder of Christianity became blurred and faded, causing a series of misunderstandings and mistake and not only among Protestant Christians– most affected by this evanescence -, but even among Catholics. A crisis from which the whole of Christianity is striving to recover, thanks to authoritative studies of Jewish researchers and though the teachings of the recent Pontiffs– principally Benedict XVI who has this theme deeply at heart–, and thanks to numerous studies by Catholic and secular authors. A chorus on the historic data amply confirms the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish Rabbi and the founder of the world's most widespread religion.
Of course, like all “fashions” this can have its risks. The first and perhaps the most serious is that the Jewish identity of Jesus may not be understood as a characteristic which connects Him with Judaism in the strict sense. Jesus was undoubtedly a Jew and always will be, but this was precisely why he criticised, as the Rabbi he was, the Judaism of his day, bringing to completion and to perfection what had been announced by the prophets of Israel; He restored the originality of the message which God entrusted to the Patriarchs with numerous different Revelations recorded in the Old Testament. What Jesus did essentially was to connect the ancient revelation to Abraham, with his own person, human and divine which recapitulated in itself that salvation which God inaugurated with Abraham. A soldering achieved after encountering, teaching and in some cases, converting, some followers of the composite Jewish thought of the times, which we know was remodelled to meet legalistic and nationalist criteria which had emerged after the Mosaic experience and above all after the exile in Babylon.
The second risk, is only apparently less dangerous. The fact that many intellectuals, religious and non, Jews and Catholics, atheists and indifferent are rediscovering the historic dimension of Jesus of Nazareth, is a double edged sword. Although on everyone's lips, it is also true that the terms used are often approximate, exaggeratedly personal, relativist and sentimental. You cannot make Jesus say something He never ever said, or worse, precisely because he is an historical personage, the clear and simple message which he addressed first of all to the Jews and through them to all humanity. He said several times that He was the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity: true man but also true God and therefore God in person. Things being thus, the Jews cannot reduce his historical message to that of a prophet or a Rabbi, however authoritative, and others cannot say “I love Jesus more than God”. Jesus is God and to affirm the contrary means to misunderstand his message or distort it.
In the valid article by Olmi interesting parts reveal a rediscovered and more profound friendship with Jesus; a most deserving fact, but in no few parts - as we see in many other testimonies which ride the fortunate mode of the historic dimension of Jesus of Nazareth, sad to say often the work of distinguished experts in History of world religions– what is distorted, emptied and relativised is precisely Jesus' way of thinking and acting. How can one believe in Jesus, the Son of God, and question the virginity of his mother Mary? Or say I love men more than God and that this is what God wants? Or say that Jesus, the Verb made flesh par excellence, came not to teach us the Word of God, understood as words pronounced, instead he came as the Word of God to live human life? How can they compare the teachings of Jesus with those of Tolstoj or Gandhi, all figures, models, proposals for life? And ultimately, that you can be there His disciple without “getting up on the cross"?
Remarks which on the one hand communicate an essence more than a form of religiosity of which men and women today have such dire need, on the other deny the unicity and specificity Jesus' incarnation, mission, death and resurrection. So study and rediscovery of the Jesus of history and his Jewish identity, root and foundation of Christianity, an historical event not an ideology, is to be encouraged, but it is intellectually essential to avoid the mistake of relativising or bending Jesus of Nazareth, hypostasis of the Trinity, with all the weight of this statement, to one's own personal needs, even if this were to be done in good faith. (Agenzia Fides 27/6/2008)
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