Wednesday, December 17, 2008

'You've got to find what you love,'


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.
'You've got to find what you love,'
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.

Source : http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html



Thursday, December 04, 2008

mere thoughts....



mere thoughts are useless.
They only serve as goodbye.
If there was truly time for a goodbye....
then all the suffering before
would have been worth it.
Time is short.
where is there joy after sorrow.

--- Yang Guo [ROCH]

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

A wind reaches my ear and says....



Cultivate your hunger before you idealize.
Motivate your anger to make them all realize.
Climbing the mountain, never coming down.
Break into the contents, never falling down.

My knee is still shaking, like I was twelve,
Sneaking out of the classroom, by the back door.
A man railed at me twice though, but I didn't care.
Waiting is wasting for people like me.

You say, "Dreams are dreams.
"I ain't gonna play the fool anymore."
You say, "'Cause I still got my soul."

Take your time, baby, your blood needs slowing down.
Breach your soul to reach yourself before you gloom.
Reflection of fear makes shadows of nothing, shadows of nothing.

You still are blind, if you see a winding road,
'Cause there's always a straight way to the point you see.

Don't try to live so wise.
Don't cry 'cause you're so right.
Don't dry with fakes or fears,
'Cause you will hate yourself in the end.


----Author - Akeboshi

Being alone with nature




Imagine the peace you get when you’re alone.
Not just being alone but in a quiet and peaceful environ.
I’ve felt the need to be alone, to look at the stars of the sky, the beautiful white clouds, feel the soothing effect of the free air. Appreciate nature.
Being alone is not being lonely, but it is isolation with a purpose. Some people just need to be in company of themselves, for better understanding of themselves. Positive Inspiration is mostly felt when one is in solitude.

Try to go to river banks or somewhere peaceful where you can have time to think and wonder. It keeps your mind at rest and makes your brain function optimally.
A place where you wouldn’t have to think about the problems and sorrows of this life, where we experience extreme peace and comfort in a world of strife, where we understand ourselves better. Some of the best poems i ever wrote were written in my lonely hour, devoid of noise or distraction where i could really feel what i was writing about, where my mind’s eye could see a clear picture which is interpreted by the brain and expressed through the beauty of language.

In peace we would function better, although i love music very much. I love to turn the volume to the maximum and let it flow in me, but my hour of solitude lets life to flow steadily.

Let’s try to get some peaceful time alone in the company of ourselves and behold the beauty of nature.
To experience Solace in Solitude

Sunday, November 09, 2008

To my closest friends whom I miss everyday......



It is almost as hard for friends to meet
As for the morning and evening stars.
Tonight then is a rare event,
Joining, in the candlelight,
Two men who were young not long ago
But now are turning grey at the temples.
...To find that half our friends are dead
Shocks us, burns our hearts with grief.
We little guessed it would be twenty years
Before I could visit you again.
When I went away, you were still unmarried;
But now these boys and girls in a row
Are very kind to their father's old friend.
They ask me where I have been on my journey;
And then, when we have talked awhile,
They bring and show me wines and dishes,
Spring chives cut in the night-rain
And brown rice cooked freshly a special way.
...My host proclaims it a festival,
He urges me to drink ten cups --
But what ten cups could make me as drunk
As I always am with your love in my heart?
...Tomorrow the mountains will separate us;
After tomorrow-who can say?

--- Du Fu

Green are the garden sunflowers wet with dew,
Awaiting the sun who's to rise anew.
The spring benign is lavishing her favour
On all things, which are glowing with splendour.
In their lush growth there's still the fear
That they will wither when autumn comes near.
All the rivers eastward to the seas flow,
When have the waters ever return'd, though?
One who in his youth does not take great pains,
When old, will but regret and grieve in vain.

--- Han dynasty

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Thoughts for life


"There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea and the music in its roar;
I love not man the less, but Nature more."
— Lord Byron

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Being yourself is being one



Being is one, the world is many...and between the two is the divided mind, the
dual mind. It is just like a big tree, an ancient oak: the trunk is one, then the tree divides into two main branches, the main bifurcation, from which a thousand and
one bifurcations of branches grow. The being is just like the trunk of the tree --
one, non-dual -- and the mind is the first bifurcation where the tree divides into
two, becomes dual, becomes dialectical: thesis and antithesis, man and woman,
yin and yang, day and night, God and Devil, yoga and Zen. All the dualities of the
world are basically in the duality of the mind -- and below the duality is oneness
of being. If you slip below, underneath the duality you will find one -- call it God,
call it nirvana, or whatsoever you like.

If you go higher through the duality, you come to the many million-fold world.
This is one of the most basic insights to be understood -- that mind is not one.
Hence, whatsoever you see through the mind becomes two. It is just like a white
ray entering a prism; it is immediately divided into seven colors and the rainbow
is created. Before it entered the prism it was one, through the prism it is divided.
and the white color disappears into the seven colors of the rainbow.

In short...

The world is a rainbow, the mind is a prism, and the being is the white ray.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Society.....

It's a mystery to me
we have a greed
with which we have agreed

You think you have to want
more than you need,
until you have it all you won't be free

society, you're a crazy breed
I hope you're not lonely without me

When you want more than you have
you think you need
and when you think more than you want
your thoughts begin to bleed

I think I need to find a bigger place
'cos when you have more than you think
you need more space

there's those thinking more or less less is more
but if less is more how you're keeping score?
Means for every point you make
your level drops
kinda like its starting from the top
you can't do that...

society, have mercy on me
I hope you're not angry if I disagree
society, crazy and deep
I hope you're not lonely without me

---Eddie Vedder [Movie-Into The Wild]

Friday, October 24, 2008

note to self

My HBS mentor's word.

Believe where others doubt.
Work where others refuse.
Save where others waste.
Stay where others quit.
Dare to be different.
Be a winner!!



I Too Had a Dream - Dr. Verghese Kurien


Taken from this http://noelatwork.blogspot.com/ blog

Friday, October 17, 2008

planned-unplanned life, love-hate life, successful-failure life,.....?LIFE??

LIFE is in living. It is not a thing, it is a process. There is no way to attain to life except by living it, except by being alive, by flowing, streaming with it. If you are seeking the meaning of life in some dogma, in some philosophy, in some
theology, that Is the sure way to miss life and meaning both.

Life is not somewhere waiting for you, it is happening in you. It is not in the future as a goal to be arrived at, it is herenow, this very moment -- in your breathing,circulating in your blood, beating in your heart. Whatsoever you are is your life,and if you start seeking meaning somewhere else, you will miss it. Man has done that for centuries.

Concepts have become very important, explanations have become very important
-- and the real has been completely forgotten. We don't look to that which is
already here, we want rationalisations.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Unknown path, Haze future and Insane decision

Such is the way of the world
You can never know
Just where to put all your faith
And how will it grow

Gonna rise up
Burning black holes in dark memories
Gonna rise up
Turning mistakes into gold

Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
Suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold

Gonna rise up
Find my direction magnetically
Gonna rise up
Throw down my ace in the hole

---- Eddie Vedder

Just feel it.

Have no fear
For when I'm alone
I'll be better off than I was before

I've got this light
I'll be around to grow
Who I was before
I cannot recall

Long nights allow me to feel...
I'm falling...I am falling
The lights go out
Let me feel
I'm falling
I am falling safely to the ground
Ah...

I'll take this soul that's inside me now
Like a brand new friend
I'll forever know

I've got this light
And the will to show
I will always be better than before

Long nights allow me to feel...
I'm falling...I am falling
The lights go out
Let me feel
I'm falling
I am falling safely to the ground