My 1st step down in Mumbai and there’s the fragrance in the air which brings magical illusion.. it just re-energises every one for a bumpy and adventurous ride to the city of dreams ……..the fragrance of air had the essence of hard sweat of honest wage earner and the belligerent attitude of the gun men and mafia of corporate (professionals)
Each activity I performed that day made me realise the dual face of the city the duality which feel is seen throughout the man kind the fight of evil and the good
Walking across the beautiful marine drive the gorgeous and blistering sea winds shouted lot loud at me asking me to dream and that same time the winds also pushed my dreams in high sky just like a kite… just to realize later that there are million other kites trying to crush your dream kite. Chocking each dream with the icy hands of death. The city of dreams suddenly turned into a genocide graveyard …..
Walking further to a railways station I saw the love of mother Mumbai who in spite of its scarce land absorbs 1,000 of people each day into her arms. However unlike other mother and child relationship the care each child would get will depend upon the desire and attitude he shows in achieving those dreams which brought him to the mystical MUMBAI …..
Most of mumbai’s population resides in slums….. where food clothing and clean water is also a luxury. The eyes of the slum dwellers can be compared with a broken mirror….full of pain and helplessness.. yet those silent eyes communicate a story which is so distinct from other slum dweller i guess each story can be made into a bollywood blockbuster…..
Even in that shabby environment and pathetically awful civic conditions they had some thing which most of us in the middle and upper class have either forgotten or lost and that is “smile on there faces”.. love and compassion in their tear filled hearts.
It is said “tranquility is best seen in adversity” and believe me when I meet these people the faith in this statement is just re-instated.
Beneath The charismatic glamour of 7 star hotels, celebs, discos and amazingly scintillating corporate offices
there lies another Mumbai…… a parallel life line of acute poverty, shanty and starvation. Where clothing is synonymous to nakedness
These two life lines are like railway tracks which run parallel and can never meet but are necessary or else
“The MUMBAI EXPESS” will derail.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Saturday, June 20, 2009
HE made me Resilient
Could anything be more beautiful than the buoyancy of strength--in the face of challenges, difficulties, and even disasters?
Strength--not as brute force, but as the ability to reach out and connect, to ask for help, and to heal from pain. In studying resilience --as the field itself is known- today I explore the human story in its essence.
Story of a person born into tough and even terrible circumstances, who is taking fate in his own hands and somehow managing to reshape lives of his loved ones.
Story of Sukhdev (cleaner @ sarvapalli) indeed the kid is the dev of happiness as his name suggests..
He works right from 6 am in the morning till 10 pm at night and studies till late night. Each day I saw the guy and felt I wish I can go and speak to him and tell him how remarkable he is and ask how he manages work and study so elegantly. Wish I could learn this art too .where most of the people enjoy the rich educational facilities of NIA this guy out performs most of them with minimum facility.
Once during a casual interaction I asked him I have seen sometimes people are rude to you how do you take it? How come you're so resilient r His answer, brilliant and pithy, was simply this "I have learnt the ability to turn every tragedy into comedy." And the ability, surely, to embrace both.
I guess it were those wise words that are helping me perform so well even in a totally new place of work
Strength--not as brute force, but as the ability to reach out and connect, to ask for help, and to heal from pain. In studying resilience --as the field itself is known- today I explore the human story in its essence.
Story of a person born into tough and even terrible circumstances, who is taking fate in his own hands and somehow managing to reshape lives of his loved ones.
Story of Sukhdev (cleaner @ sarvapalli) indeed the kid is the dev of happiness as his name suggests..
He works right from 6 am in the morning till 10 pm at night and studies till late night. Each day I saw the guy and felt I wish I can go and speak to him and tell him how remarkable he is and ask how he manages work and study so elegantly. Wish I could learn this art too .where most of the people enjoy the rich educational facilities of NIA this guy out performs most of them with minimum facility.
Once during a casual interaction I asked him I have seen sometimes people are rude to you how do you take it? How come you're so resilient r His answer, brilliant and pithy, was simply this "I have learnt the ability to turn every tragedy into comedy." And the ability, surely, to embrace both.
I guess it were those wise words that are helping me perform so well even in a totally new place of work
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Listening to some 1 :)
The otherday i met a person and went on listening how she felt on loosing the biggest support of life... the long story can be summuried as below
oohh i just sneezed...... bless me !!!
Awesome song by train-Hopeless
I hopelessly, helplessly, wonder why
Everything gotta change around me
I'd tell it to your face
But you lost your face along the way
And I'd say it on the phone
If I thought you were alone
Why do things have to change
But you don't need my pictures on your wall
You say you need no one
And you don't need my secret midnight call
I guess you need no one
Is anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell if it's heaven if it's hell or if it's
Anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell this tale
You're in and out up and down
Wonder if you're lost or found
But I got my hands on you
Are you strong enough to tow the line
Are you gonna make me yours
Or do I make you mine
I'm in and out I'm up and down
Wonder if I'm lost or found
But I need your hands on me now
But you don't need my pictures on your wall
You say you need no one
And you don't need my secret midnight call
I guess you need no one
Is anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell if it's heaven if it's hell or if it's
Anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell this tale
I hopelessly, helplessly, wonder why
Everything gotta change
oohh i just sneezed...... bless me !!!
Awesome song by train-Hopeless
I hopelessly, helplessly, wonder why
Everything gotta change around me
I'd tell it to your face
But you lost your face along the way
And I'd say it on the phone
If I thought you were alone
Why do things have to change
But you don't need my pictures on your wall
You say you need no one
And you don't need my secret midnight call
I guess you need no one
Is anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell if it's heaven if it's hell or if it's
Anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell this tale
You're in and out up and down
Wonder if you're lost or found
But I got my hands on you
Are you strong enough to tow the line
Are you gonna make me yours
Or do I make you mine
I'm in and out I'm up and down
Wonder if I'm lost or found
But I need your hands on me now
But you don't need my pictures on your wall
You say you need no one
And you don't need my secret midnight call
I guess you need no one
Is anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell if it's heaven if it's hell or if it's
Anybody waiting at home for you
Cause it's time that will tell this tale
I hopelessly, helplessly, wonder why
Everything gotta change
Saturday, May 30, 2009
i read this one in one nutts diary --“humans mocking humanity”
July 13 2007 edited and reworked
The illusionary honesty of people some times makes me look deep within how……. I along with modern Humans (so called) am mocking humanity. I would rather say its we “humans mocking humanity” guess this statement would arguably be the best title for the write up
Yesterday I was having a wonderful conversation with a friend as usual in those moments of fun the friend as ever had a very wonderful thing to say friend said “every one of us is self centered just that the degree of self centeredness that varies” I know the trans-empirical self in me could answer her but some how my own empirical self stopped me to answer and I mutely and humbly accepted the valuable point she made
Today I faced my empirical and trans-empirical self Seeing Eye to eye and in war of Beliefs and the way they seeing things
The empirical self said
Some ones loss is some ones gain. Vaibhav I guess there is nothing wrong in using some ones virtues for your benefit because we all do it. Today you need to understand value is not only thing …………..smartness of your mind and your ability to make others work for you will help you achieve what you dream Of …….. Even your own beloved krishna could not escape this…. even he had to get self centered in order to help pandavas win over kauravas.
Today if you don’t use any one…. some one will use you and you know for a fact that your clean heart will be more hurt than the one who used you. He would just laugh at your “so called values” which would give you nothing but just pain……..
Tans – empirical self replied
Today the degree of self-centeredness is getting higher and that is bothering me.
What annoys me that people today don’t what other people. They what from other people .
You say how ridiculous is your thought “bull shiting” .
I as usual being politically correct would say NO comments.
For me this self centeredness doesn’t work. The idea for me is about being honest to my self
That self shouts aloud in my consciousness.
Why should I be selfish?
Am I here to be selfish?
Should I be among one who will built his success on graves of others dream?
Yes I consider selfish people are ones who build their success on graves of others dreams because they are so self centered (always me 1st ). The word “I/me” is more prominent than “We”
Most times in this rat race we can’t see our true love giving self as it is covered with illusionary dust of “self- centeredness”
Even my beloved krishna knew what he did was wrong and hence he paid consequences for it… he was killed in a painful manner even he had to bare the suffocation for the acts done.
The debate went on for hours and days perhaps weeks today I tried to judge them but I could I just said to myself
Listening to both of them "I've stopped thinking how people should be but believe that we should be cheerleaders for ourselves and others. And I've realized how important it is simply to be there for the people when they need you. Providing them that hand of care, a smile of hope and a blessing called faith”
As cold play in the song would say
What if there was no light.
Nothing wrong, nothing right.
What if there was no time?
And no reason or rhyme?
The illusionary honesty of people some times makes me look deep within how……. I along with modern Humans (so called) am mocking humanity. I would rather say its we “humans mocking humanity” guess this statement would arguably be the best title for the write up
Yesterday I was having a wonderful conversation with a friend as usual in those moments of fun the friend as ever had a very wonderful thing to say friend said “every one of us is self centered just that the degree of self centeredness that varies” I know the trans-empirical self in me could answer her but some how my own empirical self stopped me to answer and I mutely and humbly accepted the valuable point she made
Today I faced my empirical and trans-empirical self Seeing Eye to eye and in war of Beliefs and the way they seeing things
The empirical self said
Some ones loss is some ones gain. Vaibhav I guess there is nothing wrong in using some ones virtues for your benefit because we all do it. Today you need to understand value is not only thing …………..smartness of your mind and your ability to make others work for you will help you achieve what you dream Of …….. Even your own beloved krishna could not escape this…. even he had to get self centered in order to help pandavas win over kauravas.
Today if you don’t use any one…. some one will use you and you know for a fact that your clean heart will be more hurt than the one who used you. He would just laugh at your “so called values” which would give you nothing but just pain……..
Tans – empirical self replied
Today the degree of self-centeredness is getting higher and that is bothering me.
What annoys me that people today don’t what other people. They what from other people .
You say how ridiculous is your thought “bull shiting” .
I as usual being politically correct would say NO comments.
For me this self centeredness doesn’t work. The idea for me is about being honest to my self
That self shouts aloud in my consciousness.
Why should I be selfish?
Am I here to be selfish?
Should I be among one who will built his success on graves of others dream?
Yes I consider selfish people are ones who build their success on graves of others dreams because they are so self centered (always me 1st ). The word “I/me” is more prominent than “We”
Most times in this rat race we can’t see our true love giving self as it is covered with illusionary dust of “self- centeredness”
Even my beloved krishna knew what he did was wrong and hence he paid consequences for it… he was killed in a painful manner even he had to bare the suffocation for the acts done.
The debate went on for hours and days perhaps weeks today I tried to judge them but I could I just said to myself
Listening to both of them "I've stopped thinking how people should be but believe that we should be cheerleaders for ourselves and others. And I've realized how important it is simply to be there for the people when they need you. Providing them that hand of care, a smile of hope and a blessing called faith”
As cold play in the song would say
What if there was no light.
Nothing wrong, nothing right.
What if there was no time?
And no reason or rhyme?
Friday, March 20, 2009
Steve jobs @ stanford
" 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 5c 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.
________________________________________
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………”
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 5c 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.
________________________________________
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………”
Steve jobs @ stanford
" 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 5c 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.
________________________________________
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………”
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 5c 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.
________________________________________
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………”
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