Have you ever thought that life is not fair and everything
you have ever done caused more havoc than you wanted? Yeah, right! That goes
for us all human so don’t think you are alone in your predicament,
we are all
encountering some sort of dejection and trial and reasons to quit, numerous to
be modest but in it all, there’s always something lurked deep inside that hang
on to the quay of life; HOPE.
So click on this video and see if what Steve Jobs, (yea the
same guy that invented Apple, and iPhone and Macintosh and Toy Story) has to
say is worth listening to just before quitting.
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life,
Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of
Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the
opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself -- at the
university's 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.
Have a good watch! Or you can simply read the text below
Find excerpt below:
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 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,
wow! wow! wow!
ReplyDeleteStay foolish, stay hungry....olumide
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