subject: Stay Hungry... Stay Foolish: Steve Jobs shares his personal life [print this page] Stay Hungry..Stay Hungry... Stay Foolish: Steve Jobs shares his personal life
While researching for a topic that is always on our minds, yet a very few of us really do something about it, "Work-Life Balance", I came across the transcript of Steve Jobscommencement speech at Harvard in 2005. What he said made me realizewhat goes in his mind and how he feels things.
I must have watched this video a couple of years back, however, the transcript got me cornered!
This is how icons and people who have been able to change the world think. With their thinking and the will to do something about it, they have been able to achieve everything that you and I could only dream about. And even THAT we don't do BecauseLoag kya kahengay! What will people think. To know more about dreaming big, please read my earlier post,Do people laugh at your dreams?'.
Steve dropped out of college and yet made it big. He says, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I have come to a college graduation.
I'd like you to click on thelink here & read the transcript, orclick here to watch it on Youtube.
He tells 3 stories about his life.
1.Connecting the dots
He says do whatever you love doing. In the end the dots will connect. He learnt calligraphy in college and dropping out of everything that he was supposed to do. In his words:
"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."
2.Love and Loss
Most of us know that Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple when he was 30. Imagine being fired from a company that you created in your parents garage which made it big to a US $2 billion company.
He says:"Ididn'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
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."
Makes sense? YOU think you are a failure? At what age? Lost everything? RETHINK!
3.Thinking ofDeath Makes You Follow Your Heart!
Steve got diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. "I didn't even know what pancreas was!" Yet, luckily it was a rare kind which could be cured through surgery. In his words:
"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 everythingall external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failurethese 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."
And his famous words:
"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."
In the end, he says he read this at the back of an old magazine 40 years back which said:
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."
This is a must read for everyone. Means everyone!
So, please take time out and read the whole transcript or watch the video. You won't regret it, I promise.
