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raj_rathee
June 22nd, 2005, 07:37 AM
Steve Jobs speech at Stanford...Pretty nice. Had to break it up
in two parts to post since exceeded max length for one post...

> Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
>
> 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
>
> This is the text of the Commencement address by
> Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar
> Animation Studios, delivered 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 5ยข 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.
>

raj_rathee
June 22nd, 2005, 07:38 AM
> 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.
>
>
>

dchhill
June 22nd, 2005, 08:15 AM
Truly inspiring....................... what else to say..................destiny prevails.......................................:) ........................karma karte raho phal ki chintaaa mat karo is clear frm this story...............thx rathi saheb..................bytheway kaha se laate ho ye stuff ;)

regards
Divya

raj_rathee
June 22nd, 2005, 08:23 AM
Yaar jab Karma karne ka munn nahin karta toh aaltu faaltu sites aur emails
par waqt zahir karte huye aise cheeje milti hain...

ha ha ha


bytheway kaha se laate ho ye stuff ;)

regards
Divya