Blessed are those who take a leap into the future

A speech I am much inspired by

'You've got to find what you love,'

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Great Video- Interview with Jeffrey Archer

Do not just write. Imbibe.

"The moment when I'm no more than a writer, I will cease to be a writer."

Albert Camus

Rainy Days And Mondays

Talkin' to myself and feelin' old
Sometimes I'd like to quit
Nothing ever seems to fit
Hangin' around
Nothing to do but frown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

What I've got they used to call the blues
Nothin' is really wrong
Feelin' like I don't belong
Walkin' around
Some kind of lonely clown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

Funny but it seems I always wind up here with you
Nice to know somebody loves me
Funny but it seems that it's the only thing to do
Run and find the one who loves me.

What I feel has come and gone before
No need to talk it out
We know what it's all about
Hangin' around
Nothing to do but frown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

On Karen Carpenter

Two days back, I heard on the airwaves a song that I liked immediately- 'On Top Of The World.'

When I next came online, I searched it up on YouTube and came to know that it was by 'The Carpenters' and immediately fell in love with the gorgeous smile of the lady who sang it. So, I searched about her on google too.

Karen Carpenter and her brother Richard were the brother-sister duo who made 'The Carpenters.' And, on the wikipedia article about her, I discovered that Karen had died at merely 32 years, because of Anorexia Nervosa. It's an eating disorder in which the patient diets compulsively to keep her body weight down. The article said that Karen's tragic death shook the world into awareness about this debilitating disease.

I have been feeling sad since then, since yesterday. I had loved 'On Top Of the World' so much! A friend of mine is getting married. I had thought I would gift this song to her.

Today, I went to You Tube again, and listened to the song. And, I read the comments people had given. So many of them were about her tragic death! So many lamented the fact that she had not considered herself beautiful enough and had taken such drastic measures.

I am feeling an ache.

In this special edition video, they have merged the clips of 3 of her performances of 'On Top Of the World.' The first one is about two years before her death, and I felt so sad to see her look so old already (when she was just thirty), with hollow looking cheeks. The second clip, which has her in white gown, is the one that I had seen the day before yesterday, and loved so much! There is such a joy on her face there! It's as if she is actually in love, and the happiness is radiating from her.

The contrast just made me sadder.

I met a reader on the road

Haha...the title is quite pompous, isn't it? Nah, I am not that famous yet. I hardly have any readers. Yet. And that is precisely why I was so delighted to meet a dedicated one.

Richa, this one is for you. Thank you so much! :-)

I had gone to the University for some work, and was on my way out when I saw Richa walking towards the road I was on. She was with her father. Such chance meetings with someone you know from college or school are always so exciting! I was so happy to see her!

She was my batchmate in college. And,one of the first things she told me was that she reads my blog regularly. I was like, "Really???" And then she went even further and said that she had read all my stories here too, and that she liked my blog! I was like..."Wow!" and "Wow!" and "Wow!"....hey, I used to think that I am pretty much talking to myself on the blog; but it seems that there ARE some silent readers here....who come and read and then silently go away, without leaving any footprints. So I don't even know they were here. I wish I could! :-)

Thank You Richa...those 10 minutes made my day! :-)

What makes a Hit?

I found this article related to the discussion we had on my blog some time back- On what gets defined as Literature and what not?

About the Author:

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, an adjunct professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, and the author of the just released book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Lessons from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books).

The article has been Republished from here.

The new science of evolutionary economics explains why some candidates, like some products, get ahead in the marketplace

By Michael Shermer


As the presidential candidates bounce from primary to primary, with some surging and others falling back, it is appropriate to ask if there is something going on here more than simply political preferences and perceived positions on issues. There is. In my latest book, The Mind of the Market, I discuss a phenomenon called the Matthew Effect. It is a disturbing disruption of what we think of as democratic fairness. Here's how it works.

In Jesus' Parable of the Talents, recounted in Matthew 25:14-29, the gospel author recalls the messiah as saying in the final verse: "For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away." Out of context this hardly sounds like the wisdom of the prophet who proclaimed that the meek shall inherit the earth, but in context, Jesus' point was that properly investing one's money (as measured in "talents") generates even more wealth. The servant who was given five talents invested it and gave his master ten talents in return. The servant who was given two talents invested it and gave his master four talents in return. But the servant who was given one talent buried it in the ground and gave his master back just the one talent. The master then ordered his risk-averse servant to give the one talent to the servant who had doubled his investment of five talents, and so he who earned the most was rewarded with even more. And thus it is that the rich get richer.

Jesus probably had in mind something more than an economic allegory about selecting the right investment tool for your money, but the story is a parable about how people and products can gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace. In the 1960s, the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton conducted an extensive study of how scientific ideas are discovered and credited in the marketplace of ideas and discovered that eminent scientists typically receive more credit than they deserve simply by dint of having a big name, while their junior colleagues and graduate students, who usually do most of the work, go largely unnoticed. A similar well-known effect can be seen in how both innovative ideas and clever quotes gravitate up and are given credit to the most famous person associated with them.

Merton called this the Matthew Effect. Marketers know it as Cumulative Advantage. Once a product gets a head-start in sales it signals to consumers that other people want that product and therefore it must be good, thereby causing them to desire it as well, which leads even more people to purchase the product, sending more signals to other consumers that they too must have it, and so it climbs up the bestseller list. Everyone in business knows about the effect, which is why authors and publishers, for example, try so fervently to land their book on the New York Times bestseller list. Once you are on the list bookstores move your title to the "bestseller" bookcase (sometimes even labeled "New York Times Bestseller List") and to the front of the store where copies of the book are stacked like cordwood. This sends a signal to potential book buyers entering the store that this must be a good read, triggering an increase in sales that gets reported to the New York Times book review editors, who bump the title up the list, sending another signal to bookstore buyers to order even more copies, which secures the title more time in the bestseller list that increases sales even further, and round and round the feedback loop goes as the richest authors get even richer.

To find out if the Bestseller Effect is real, the Columbia University sociologist Duncan Watts and his collaborators Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds tested it in a Web-based experiment in which 14,000 participants registered at a Web site where they had the opportunity to listen to, rate, and download songs by unknown bands. One group of registrants were only given the names of the songs and bands, while a second group of registrants were also shown how many times the song had been downloaded. The researchers called this the "social influence" condition, because they wanted to know if seeing how many people had downloaded a song would influence subjects' decision on whether or not to download it. Predictably, the Web participants in the social influence condition were influenced by the download rate figures: songs with a higher download number were more likely to be downloaded by new participants, whereas subjects in the independent group who saw no download rates, revealed dramatically different song preferences. This is not to deny that the quality of a song or a book or any other product does not matter. Of course it does, and this too is measurable. But it turns out that subjective consumer preferences grounded in relative rankings by other consumers can and often does wash out the effects of more objective ratings of product quality.

Markets that traffic in rankings, ratings, and bestseller lists seem to operate on their own volition, seemingly beyond the control of the forces within. Thinking of the political landscape as a market and the candidates as competing products, we can see how polls and media coverage confer the Matthew Effect upon certain candidates, thereby shifting voter preferences and loyalties like so many brands in the supermarket. The moment Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus the Matthew Effect kicked into high gear, generating immediate media attention, driving political pundits to shift their focus, and creating a positive feedback loop in which the media-rich candidate got even richer.

So in addition to the actual value of a political product, our shifting brand political preferences often have more to do with this peculiar social phenomenon than it does what we like to think of as democratic fairness.

Hap

A poem by Thomas Hardy

(Note: the literal meaning of 'Hap' is Luck)

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.


In his poem “Hap” Thomas Hardy writes about chance and the random nature of life.

In the first stanza he writes of his desire that “some vengeful god would call to [him]/ From up the sky and laugh.” He wishes that the god would admit to taking joy from the suffering of the lowly mortal. Why does Hardy ask for such a sadistic, vengeful god? Hardy gives his answer in the second stanza of the poem. He writes that the existence of such a god would allow him to bear his sufferings with a feeling of righteous anger, or “ire unmerited.” The existence of such a god would be useful to Hardy because he could direct all his anger created by suffering at one being. It would also ease his suffering to know that “ a powerfuller than [himself]/ had willed and meted me the tears [he] shed.” In other words, Hardy’s suffering would be reduced if only he knew that some force greater than he had caused the suffering he experiences. In the third stanza Hardy laments about the fact that the existence of such a convenient, vengeful god is “not so.” After he states that no malevolent god exists to deal out his sorrows, he asks, “How arrives it joy lies slain,/ and why unblooms the best hope ever sown?” Why should he not be happy if there is no malevolent force preventing it? Why should all his hopes be ruined? Hardy answers his own questions by writing that “Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,/ and dicing time for gladness casts a moan.” In other words, Hardy is saying that only random chance is responsible for his suffering. In the last two lines of his poem he writes about the fact that random chance has indifferently given him as many blessings as sufferings in his life.

A sense of Rootlessness

Just out of the blue, I thought of searching about Jarnail Chitarkaar, whose paintings of the Punjabi culture I've grown up with.

I found him online, but not many of his works were featured on his site.

Nevertheless, one was- Bhatta lai ke challi khet nu



I was in class sixth or seventh when I used to love these paintings of his so much that I had painted some of them myself. This was one of them.

I used to be so proud of my Punjabi identity at that time. I used to collect Punjabi poems, couplets; I used to do active research about my history and culture. I used to dream dreams of doing my language proud.

I miss that activism now. And, I deeply miss that innocent enthusiasm. I wish it comes back...

On Ability

"So, let's start again from the beginning. Theaetetus, try to define knowledge. Don't ever say that it's beyond your ability. If God is willing, and if you find the courage, ability will follow."

Socrates to the young student 'Theaetetus', in the eponymous book by Plato.