Post No. 122e: You've Got to Find What You Love

Yesterday, we posted P.J. O’Rourke’s commencement advice provided in May of 2008, which O’Rourke suggested was unlikely to be heard elsewhere.

The following is what we understand to be the text of the commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Founder of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005, to Stanford University students, according to the Stanford Report, June 14, 2005. It is a bit more in the traditional mold of such speeches. From the research that we conducted, it appears to be substantially accurate.

All of us, including our college student audience, should give this advice some consideration. It might change your life.

“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, it’s 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 parent’s 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 4,000 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 world’s 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 it’s 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.”

Post No. 34: Opportunity to Serve as Guest Author – It’s Your Turn to Express Yourself

© 2008, The Institute for Applied Common Sense

Since we started this blog in April of 2008, numerous readers have asked us about the blogging experience, and how they might start their own blogs. It took us almost two years to actually do so, and we regret not having done so earlier.

A blog opens up a whole new world to you, and allows interaction with folks all over the world, about all sorts of subjects. The blogosphere is truly a global virtual community.

(For those interested, a major blogging convention is scheduled for Greensboro, NC on Thursday and Friday, October 16 and 17, 2008 (http://convergesouth.com.) On Saturday, October 18, 2008 BlogHer (http://www.blogher.com), a community for women who blog, visits the city as part of its traveling tour.)

We’re going to provide you with an opportunity to post an article or articles on our blog, as Guest Authors, consistent with the goals and principles of the Institute for Applied Common Sense.

There is no need to repeat our philosophy here; it appears stated in the right column of the blog. However, before getting to the Guest Author opportunity, we thought that we should share with you a profile of our readership.

There are many widgets and tracking devices which can be installed on a blog, to provide information about the visiting traffic. We are particularly enthralled with http://www.sitemeter.com . Even their free service provides valuable information, as will be reflected below.

The vast majority of the readers of this blog appear to be non-bloggers. We frequently receive direct e-mails containing comments as opposed to comments on the blog. Roughly 15-20% of the readers are located in countries outside of the United States. We have regular readers from Australia, Finland, France, the Palestinian Territories in Gaza, Germany, Iceland, India, Israel, Jordan, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom.

Thus far, we can not recall any readers from China. Far more newcomers (individuals not associated with any of the members of the “It’s Your Turn™” Team) read our blog than friends of the “It’s Your Turn™” Team. The newcomers also have a tendency to read more articles and to stay on the blog reading them longer.

It appears that most of our foreign readers live in smaller cities, and we have noticed that they spend more time reading more articles than any other group.

We employ the “next blog” button feature of the Navigation Bar at the top of our blog to “blog surf” and visit other blogs. The vast majority of the other blogs which we visit are based in Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Brazil. We are actually surprised at the large number of Brazilian blogs.

Most blogs are uniquely personal. A large number display photos taken by the blogger, chronicle the lives and experiences of children or newlyweds, or display the artistic work of artists of every imaginable variety. We tend to randomly surf to other blogs and when we find one of interest, we stop and comment.

Although we are sure that there are many blogs dealing with political or societal issues, we rarely run across them. (That may be explained by the fact that we use Google’s free blogging platform, http://www.blooger.com, and those interested in professional blogging tend to buy other software for blogging.)

We joined a number of Google Groups (or discussion groups), most with some type of political theme. The bulk of our traffic is referred to us through Google Groups, following our leaving comments on the group discussion boards. We stumble through blogs written in French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and leave comments using a combination of English and our broken language in question. Most interestingly, it is the Brazilians who most frequently respond.

The readers who consider the articles, or the ideas expressed in them, to be radical or dangerous are generally Americans. We never sense any reluctance to go to another place intellectually on the part of our foreign visitors.

We have no real sense of the age demographic of our readers. We suspect that we have far more women readers than men, based on the comments.

In the U.S., our readers have a tendency to be from the West Coast, Southwest, and the Eastern Seaboard. Mid-Western readers hail from Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In the South, we get visitors from Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia; there are virtually no readers from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Tennessee. There are also very few readers from the Rocky Mountain States and the Plains States.

Our blog informs readers that the “It’s Your Turn™"Team will soon embark on a nationwide tour of college campuses to engage students in a conversation about personal responsibility and making difficult decisions. In response thereto, we have received numerous comments which generally might fall into two categories: (a) those which inquire as to where we were when they were in college; and (b) to inform them when the tour is scheduled to be in their vicinity.

The blog has evolved over time. It morphed from simply posing rhetorical questions in admittedly lengthy essays. It went through a period when we suggested theoretical constructs which might be utilized to analyze certain situations. Our original goal, which remains today, was to simply get people to think and avoid rushing to judgments and decisions.

One of our favorite stories revolves around Senator Barry Goldwater, the ultimate conservative. Just prior to his death, he was asked to identify one thing he appreciated as a senior citizen, which he did not appreciate in his youth. He replied that in his youth, he thought there were only two sides to every issue. In hindsight, he understood that there were at least three.

Our view is that there are at least 27 different ways to view everything. Not all of them are good, productive, or positive at any given particular time, and their importance definitely changes depending on the context or circumstances. However, we should be aware of them.

Another goal of this blog has always been to encourage people to “dig deeper” in trying to understand the underlying causes of problems, instead of being distracted by the superficial, and typically emotional, symptoms.

If at times you’ve been confused about the purpose and focus of this blog, you are pretty perceptive. We essentially conducted a virtual focus group during the first few months of the blog’s existence. We’re still experimenting with different approaches.

Amazingly, we have not received one, single, nasty, off the chart, emotional rant, and for that we modestly take some credit. It was not our intention to get folks worked up, but rather to get them to say, “Hmm, let me think about that.” The most frequent comment which we received was, “I hadn’t thought or looked at it that way.” We view getting folks to pause during the thought process as a good thing.

We mentioned earlier that we are inviting our readers to serve as Guest Authors. We have a few guidelines to ensure that we maintain the spirit of the blog. We’re interested in civilized, respectful discourse, between participants with open minds. We believe that reasonable people can differ about how to approach a problem. Please observe the following guidelines:

1. Please limit your article to 750 words maximum;

2. Discuss any issue in the news or societal issue that you desire;

3. Avoid just criticizing or taking a side, and instead think in terms of suggesting a solution to the issue, or at a minimum offer some reasoned alternatives;

4. Try to be as objective as possible and set aside your personal biases;

5. Pose rhetorical questions to challenge the reader to consider various options, and innovative ways to analyze the issue;

6. Avoid the use of invective and judgmental statements, which might prompt emotional responses;

7. Avoid taking sides, or the positions of the liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, etc. Your piece should cause all sides to ponder; and

8. Be sure to “dig deeper” to reach the underlying causes.

Send your articles to RDGreene27401@gmail.com with an urgent flag. As long as they are generated in good faith and generally within our guidelines, they will be published “as is,” without further editing. Be sure to tell your friends and contacts to read your articles once they are published. This should be fun.

© 2008, The Institute for Applied Common Sense