Due to the overwhelming response to the great Steve Jobs speech which I posted over the weekend. I have decided to post another one for all of your reading pleasure. Do not worry, I will definitely be posting something over the weekend. But this is just a little extra curricular for me.
This is a speech by my favourite writer Adrian Tan. Some of you may know him from his Teenage Textbook and Workbooks published more than 20 years ago. It is hilarious while at the same time very meaningful.
Till the weekend then. Have a great Friday ahead!
Adrian Tan Speech at 2008 NTU Convocation
Title: Life and how to survive it.
I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee
School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your
convocation address. It’s a wonderful honor and a privilege for me to
speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation
or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.
My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She
is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has
honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by
practising at home during conversations between her and me.
On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day
telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being
disagreeable.
Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That
is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one
who triumphs is always the wife.
And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when
you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.
Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already
be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be
married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be
married many, many times. Good for you.
The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end
of education. You’re done learning.
You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong
process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking
masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know
the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there
is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of
learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to
be repeat customers.
The good news is that they’re wrong.
The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your
entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of
you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that
you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life
expectancy.
I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean
the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about
a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.
You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as
the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind
Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why
people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing
in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little
danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching
us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into
a gentle and restful nap.
Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live
to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than
five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time
they need to spend in the bathroom.
So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another
40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.
Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re
50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their
convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet
their life expectancy.
I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.
After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever
want to expect being average.
Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working,
falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as
graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your
hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.
That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be
an awful waste.
If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living
your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have
nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them.
And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore
to prepare you to be average.
What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not
entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does
not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over
it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment
by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.
Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your
life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as
tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever
be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you
will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from
here. Or up. No one knows.
What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.
Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many
wonderful things that you can do when you are free.
The most important is this: do not work.
Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it
is undesirable.
Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from
overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it
can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day,
bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s
nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.
There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet
people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a
living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their
fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless
and, at worst, harmful.
People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a
certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei”
was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps.
Utter nonsense.
Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate
so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in
modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.
Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you
enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it
for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will
have value in itself.
I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy
it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in
some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably
a sports journalist.
So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine
you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will
have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go
further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able
to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know
what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and
feeling superior, you might become a teacher.
Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an
obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you
don’t, you are working.
Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To
those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not
asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is
dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great
capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you
are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even
conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or
equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the
truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to
appreciate the value of silence.
In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That
requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the
mirror.
I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and
that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be
hated.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet
every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been
hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred
is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused,
murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.
One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case
that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s
own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be
accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate
towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your
role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are
not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure
sign that you are doing something wrong.
The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.
I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one
changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by
anyone.
Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for
me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without
deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken
a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It
far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise.
Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance.
It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.
Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning,
attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call
happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves
in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We
celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.
Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important
to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t
happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It
grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It
is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is
less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the
heart.
You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not
reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to
inspire you.
Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to
loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your
body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It
consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.
Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.
How very true....
Best,
SVI
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
I am back but this week lets dedicate the post to Steve Jobs.
Have not had time to post anything over the past 2 weeks due to my traveling schedule. All I can say to all is, never go to Vietnam and never take Vietnam Airlines anywhere. Currently too tired to write anything substantial so I have decided to post one of my favourite speeches on my blog to share with all of you.
This week, we received the news of the great Steve Jobs once again taking medical leave and suspicions on his cancer coming back is all over the news. Thats why I decided to read his Stanford University graduation commencement speech in 2005, 1 year after he was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Lets cross our fingers for him because in my view, if Apple loses him, that is like getting its head chopped off. I really love this speech and it has inspired me to re-think my life. I hope it will help you reflect on yours too..
Enjoy the speech and I will be back next week....I hope.
Best,
SVI
Steve Jobs Stanford Speech Transcript
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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 that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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's 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's 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, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
Hope you all liked it!
This week, we received the news of the great Steve Jobs once again taking medical leave and suspicions on his cancer coming back is all over the news. Thats why I decided to read his Stanford University graduation commencement speech in 2005, 1 year after he was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Lets cross our fingers for him because in my view, if Apple loses him, that is like getting its head chopped off. I really love this speech and it has inspired me to re-think my life. I hope it will help you reflect on yours too..
Enjoy the speech and I will be back next week....I hope.
Best,
SVI
Steve Jobs Stanford Speech Transcript
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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 that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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's 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's 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, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
Hope you all liked it!
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