Steve Jobs’ address at Stanford

At a time when everything Apple has a midas touch, at a time when lines have started forming outside Apple stores nationwide a full week before iPhone’s launch, at a time when Steve is looked upon as a rockstar and God rolled into one – this makes very interesting reading.

A very close friend sent it to me and I am posting for myself – to remind me – as well as for any hapless internet straggler who stumbles across this –

 

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 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.

Apple iPhone hysteria

The hysteria of the impeding iPhone release is reaching monumental proportions both in the media and in the blogosphere. I, in my very close following of the tech and gadget scene, have never ever seen this mass feverish delirium about the impending release of a new product – any product – much less a phone.

So the iPhone is coming out on June 29th @ 6.00 pm local time. The phones will only be available in AT&T corporate stores ( and not the thousands of erstwhile Cingular franchisee stores).

According to a fan site, apparently, the AT&T stores fortunate enough to be anointed as carriers of these phones will be closed at 4.00 pm and customers asked to leave so the iPhone shipments can come in between 4.30 pm – 6.30 pm. Note that the phones are going to be shipped really close to launch time to prevent “unscrupulous employees from selling the phones before launch time”.

There are numerous countdown clocks all over the Internet counting down to the moment when the “Wireless Industry would be shaken up forever”. Accessory developers have already released covers, polishes and everything else imaginable for the iPhone. Discussion forums are abuzz with the latest enhancements that Apple announced yesterday including a better battery and a glass screen ( instead of the stock plastic).

And the hysteria seems self propagating. The more people are talking about it, the more hysteria there seems to be. This had better be a really good device without the customary Apple first release issues given that the iPhone had an almost unprecedented public testing for about 6 months.

On a more hilarious note check the video out below

Salman Rushdie’s Knighthood, Pakistan and Iran

In the latest round of British Knighting ceremonies,  Salman Rushdie ( along with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Ian Botham and a KGB Double Agent) were awarded the Knighthood and some other Orders of rather obscure nature (detailed below) by Queen Elizabeth. 

Exactly what tangible purpose is served by knighthoods  or a Companion of the British Empire (CBE) or Companion to the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) fails me. Apart from harking back to an Imperial past and an increasingly redundant aristocracy – it doesn’t mean anything very tangible. And isn’t very important to anyone at all. A British Knighthood isn’t the Nobel Prize.  And doesn’t come with a cash award.

Promptly after the announcement, half a world away in Multan Pakistan, protests and violence broke out.  Muslim students took to the street accusing Mr. Rushdie of blasphemy and other things. To make things even more comical, Mr. Mohammed Ijaz Ul-Haq ( Pakistan Religious Affairs Minister and a man of very dubious lineage – being the son of former dictator Zia Ul-Haq) allegedly commented that Mr. Rushdie had committed blasphemy and the soldiers of Islam had the right to avenge it with “Suicide Bombings”. Then apparently under pressure from the Pakistani Foreign Office, he retracted the statement.

The other usual suspect in anything Rushdie – Iran – was not to be outdone. It too, condemned the knighthood – though they didn’t take to the streets and engage in the usual buffoonery of burning effigies ( and public buses, private cars or anything they could get their hands on)

So the Islamic world is ”outraged” again. For awards of very dubious importance awarded in the UK. And when everyday, within the muslim world, the Shias and Sunnis kill innocent men, women, children, even babies – not a pipsqueak of outrage. When  Sunnis bombed the Askariya mosque in Samarra – twice – I didn’t see any Osama effigy burning in the streets of Cairo or Damascus or Tehran.

And its ironic, the biggest protest is in the country of America’s greatest ally in the war against the Taliban.

Lenovo ThinkPad Commercial

Found this very cool Lenovo commercial on Gizmodo. Worth reproducing. Very effective and entertaining advertising.

A Female President

Chances are India shall have a female president – finally. Pratibha Patil, the governor of the state of Rajasthan is the Left-UPA candidate for the presidency. And chances are, she will win the two way election process against the current Vice President, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.

She says she wont be a “rubber stamp” president, which is just as well – we need some moderating influence on our often maundering Members of Parliament. (How she would be anything but rubberstamp as a president however remains to be seen). So if she is ratified – India will have two women at two of the most visible political positions. Madam Gandhiji will have some company at those rarified heights of political prominence.

I wasn’t really aware of Pratibha Patil’s political track record – but it seems she has been involved in many ministerial positions of Social Welfare and Public Health. In my mind, an apt and appropriate record to come in as a Presidential candidate. Outlook Magazine’s website has a nice little article on her.

Next, we need an environmentalist as our President.

The pics say it all – Air Wars in India – and a lesson in aggressive advertising

The photographs say it all – very smart advertising.

Failure of the Immigration Bill

The immigration bill recently failed to pass through the Senate last week. The issue is complicated and depending on the political stripe of the person asked – different reasons are given for not supporting the bill – and some of them are understandably very legitimate.

The Bill, right from the time that it was promulgated, was opposed by both the left and the right. There were exceptions of course ( most notably, John McCain), but both extremes of the political landscape had reservations on the provisions captured there-in. Its long and complicated to describe every point of contention – but at a very high level, the left was concerned about the point system proposed as the basis of the path to legalization – the contention being that it took away the time honored American tradition of family relationship based immigration to a more overt capitalistic skills based immigration system ignoring real familial issues of illegals already in the country.

To the conservative right, anything that does not amount to trucking of 12 million people back to Mexico amounts to an “Amnesty” – and to the strongest proponents of this school of thought, it amounts to awarding breaking the law.

To look at it dispassionately, both sides have some merits to their arguments. On the Left, it is the the sudden turn-around of American principles of welcoming immigrants – just around the time when the Irish and Italian immigration waves have died down and the “brown skinned” immigration of the Mexicans in on the rise, smacks of racial prejudice, to say the least.

On the Right, the argument that those who have broken the law are being awarded with a process to citizenship has merit as well. After all, how about all those people (including those who are legal “non-resident aliens” in the United States patiently awaiting their chances for Green Cards/Citizenship or whatever they desire. And I entirely agree with their iview that the border of the country needs to be secure.

And the pragmatic approach of taking a points based system makes sense because the fact remains that Americans, in numbers large enough, do not want to do the work that the Mexican Immigrants do. And Americans are used to low commodity pricing, fueled to a large extent, by illegal immigrants working with dirt cheap wages.

Where both are wrong is this – when you fight over technicalities of the Immigration Bill – both the Left and the Right convey the impression to the fastest growing minority in the United States that they really don’t care about them. And while there are 12 million illegal immigrants, there are millions of legal Hispanics as well. And to foster a sense of discontent in such a large percentage of your population cannot be good for the security and internal societal cohesion of the United States.

Let’s face it. Noone can ship 12 millions immigrants back to Mexico, Lou Dobbs’ notwithstanding. More importantly, in an aging demographic, the US cannot afford to lose that large a chunk of its labour force – a labour force that is willing to do the kind of work that the other extended society chooses not to.

But what the failure of the Immigration Bill to pass does is – that it gives the overt notion that the politicians in the beltway don’t really care about the Hispanic population. Noone cares about the details – even me, who keeps abreast of a large portion of the intellectual debate on this topic, don’t really get all the nuances.

And this perception of effectively metaphorically disenfranchising so many cannot be a good thing.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Yet another browser – Flock

Found this brower called Flock recently. Now, I am a very avid Mozilla user and think it is pretty much the best browser in the market (Safari included). So it was only the hardcore tech fiddler in me that made me download it – and having used it for a cumulative period for about 45 minutes -I have enough thoughts for me to blog about it.

Now a couple of things – first, I am using a built-in functionality in Flock for “in-context” blogging from a particular web-page. Also, Flock, lets you drag and drop any image into a special area – where they are saved for future use. The image of Flock was dragged from the web page into that special area -and then dragged again into the page that pops up when you right click ( or Ctrl – Click on the Mac) and say Blog this from any page.

All in all pretty cool. The differentiator is integration with Yahoo! tools. For e.g. Flickr is seamlessly integrated and you can drag and drop images into your Flickr account. Awesome.

Apart from that, it has all the standards like Tabbed Browsing, a minimalistic GUI, RSS reader built in. It did freeze upon me once – and my untested assumption is that it happened because of a Java Applet running on one of the tabs.

More when I have tested this. But I am very impressed.

Meanwhile you can get more information by clicking below:

Flock Start Page

technorati tags:Software, Browser, Flock, Opinion

Blogged with Flock

New Look. And Paris back in the slammer.

Got tired of my old blog look and decided to change it. The header image, I imagine, is New York City and is pretty appropriate.

On other news, Paris is back in the slammer and has apparently decided not to contest the decision anymore. Also, according to TMZ, Paris is so terrified that she’ll be web-cam’ed if she uses the old WC, that she has stopped eating and drinking in prison.  As TMZ writes, probably not the best strategy of not using the toilet for 45 days.

Spoke too fast – Paris Hilton out!

I wrote about the principles and implementation of justice in the United States and compared that to our lack of justice against the privileged in India. I showcased the recent conviction of Scooter Libby and Paris Hilton – both very different personalities but both obviously very privileged.

Well, seems Paris was too hot for prison. According to TMZ.com, Paris Hilton was released from prison without any prior announcement by the LA Sheriff’s office. According to news reports, apparently she was on the verge of a mental breakdown and the Sheriff’s office decided to scoot rather than having a loony Paris on their hands. Fair enough. I dont blame them.

But facetiousness aside, I guess this raise two concerns. One, it would be naive to believe that all other factors remaining the same, John Doe without the benefits of Paris’ money and crass stupid penchant for sensationalism would have also got out after three days of a forty five day sentence.

The second concern is that it does raise the bugaboo of America being a country of haves and have-nots. Especially in LA, where the Police Department doesn’t exactly have a stellar image of fairness. Just a few weeks ago, they fired rubber bullets in a bunch of pro-immigration activists- apparently, without a lot of provocation. It will make those people who get thrown on the ground by police officers for standing around street corners just get more cynical of the system – and honestly, I cant say, entirely without reason.

But most importantly, I am absolutely bewildered about how someone of Ms. Hilton’s apparent intellect can go in the same sentence as the alleged “psychological problem”.

Powered by ScribeFire.