Hhmmm…Saya membaca artikel ini dan mulai berpikir tentang negara kita tercinta.
Sangat menarik pandangan Mr. Fareed Zakaria mengenai gejolak Timur Tengah sekarang ini. Yang juga sangat menarik adalah kutipan beliau ketika membandingkan Mesir dalam 10 tahun lagi akan menjadi seperti negara kita saat ini.
Saya mengerti landasan berpikirnya. Mesir adalah negara demokrasi seperti kita, bukan negara Islam. Memang, Mesir letaknya di dataran Arab (Afrika Utara lebih tepatnya) dan mayoritas penduduknya adalah Islam. Kondisi Mesir sangat mirip dengan kita mengenai presiden yang totaliter berkuasa puluhan tahun dan melakukan pembredelan media dan semua oposisi.
Sedikit kesamaan kita dengan Mesir adalah bahwa kita dan Mesir sama-sama negara dengan mayoritas penduduk beragama Islam tetapi pemacu terjadinya revolusi di kedua negara ini bukan karena gerakan para partai Islam, tetapi gerakan pemuda intelektual yang sudah tidak tahan dengan represi pemerintahnya sendiri.
Pandangan Mr. Fareed Zakaria memberi sedikit renungan untuk saya : “apakah kita negara yang hancur lebur tanpa masa depan dengan segala kekacauan yang terjadi?”
Jawaban saya adalah TIDAK!
Dengan berbagai macam kekacauan yang terjadi, kita harus bersyukur bahwa kita tidak terlibat perang saudara secara global seperti di Libya.
Dengan berbagai macam kekacauan yang terjadi, kita harus bersyukur bahwa kita masih memiliki kebebasan lebih dari pada rakyat Korea Utara.
Dengan berbagai macam kekacauan yang terjadi, kita harus bersyukur bahwa kita tidak mengalami kekeringan dan kelaparan merajalela seperti di beberapa negara di Afrika.
Kehidupan bernegara dan berbangsa adalah suatu hal yang tidak akan selesai. Setiap negara akan mengalami berbagai macam masalah bahkan di negara yang sudah maju sekalipun. Tinggal bagaimana kita melihatnya.
Are we looking at the glass half empty or half full?
Nah, celakanya, benih-benih extrimisme dan fanatisme agama sudah mulai tumbuh subur pelan-pelan. Budaya korupsi juga tetap merajalela dan para wakil rakyat sibuk memakai uang rakyat dengan membangun gedung baru.
Hal-hal seperti inilah yang harus kita cegah sejak dini.
Denger-denger sih, kalo udah jadi orang tua, semua pasti ingin yang terbaik untuk anaknya. Apakah itu dari sisi kehidupan atau pemikiran. Semua ingin keturunannya menjadi lebih baik secara mental dan spiritual.
Hidup dengan lebih baik, lebih tentram, nyaman, damai, bebas dan yah…pokoknya lebih baik lah dari pada generasi sebelumnya.
Dengan visi itu, orang tua menyekolahkan anaknya ke sekolah terbaik agar anak tersebut mengenyam pendidikan yang baik juga.
Seiring berjalannya waktu, setiap generasi mempunyai plus dan minus sendiri-sendiri. Setiap generasi ditentukan dengan lifestyle dan visi misi semua orang yang hidup di jamannya. Sejarah diukir dengan sendi kehidupan yang tertera dari setiap era.
Contoh hal bodoh mungkin begini…Saya TIDAK SETUJU perpeloncoan. Ospek, mapras, plonco atau apapun namanya semua bertujuan sama yaitu SENIORITAS dan MENINDAS. Tidak ada unsur edukasi sama sekali disini dan saya menentang “tradisi” ini. Tradisi turun temurun ini cuma suatu bentuk Tradisi yang diturunkan para senior dengan berbagai macam alasan tapi intinya sih cuma satu…Balas dendam dengan berbagai macam topeng dan kedok.
Sekarang pertanyaannya…Apabila kita memang menginginkan kehidupan terbaik untuk keturunan kita, haruskah permasalahan dan problem lama kita turunkan ke mereka? Apakah keturunan kita harus ikut memusuhi semua musuh-musuh kita atau nenek moyang kita? Apakah tidak sebaiknya mereka berpikir dan mempunyai visi yang berbeda yang tentunya lebih baik dari kita?
Kalo dulu (misalnya) kakeknya perang, mbok ya cucunya kalo bisa mencari jalan damai karena tentunya si cucu gak ada hubungannya dengan musuh si kakek. Tentu si kakek gak mau lah si cucu sampe sengsara gara-gara kesalahan si kakek, iya toh?
Nah, Mungkin gak ya generasi kita dan keturunan kita mempunyai suatu bentuk visi misi baru untuk membenahi kesalahan-kesalahan masa lalu? Untuk move on dari semua bentuk dendam hasil perang ribuan tahun lalu?
War is over…If WE want it.
*Tulisan dan pemikiran dari seorang bodoh yang tidak mengerti kenapa kita harus terus mengikuti dendam ribuan tahun lalu.
Kira-kira SMP ketika saya pergi ke toko kaset untuk membeli kaset yang direkomendasi oleh ayah saya yaitu album “Appetite for Destruction” dari Guns N’ Roses. Media mendengar musik saya waktu itu adalah kaset dengan stereo tape analog yang menjadi satu dengan radio. Kira-kira harga kaset itu sekitar Rp. 1500 saja.
Saat itu, saya lihat almarhum kakek saya memakai sebuah komputer yang saat itu belum dimiliki oleh banyak orang, hanya orang tertentu saja yang sanggup membelinya. Komputer itu berlogo buah yang sedikit tergigit berwarna-warni dan nampaknya, almarhum saat itu cukup menguasai komputer tersebut.
Sekitar 10 tahun setelah itu, saya sedang jenuh. Ketika tiba sebuah ide untuk membongkar gudang dan mencari apapun yang bisa digunakan untuk menghilangkan kebosanan saya. Lalu saya menemukan kembali kaset yang saya beli sekitar 10 tahun lalu itu “Appetite for Destruction”. Serta merta, saya kemudian memutar kembali kaset itu dan kembali menikmatinya.
Disaat yang sama, mamah saya juga mempunyai sebuah komputer dengan logo berbeda dari buah tergigit itu, dan beliau sepertinya cukup menguasai benda tersebut meskipun harganya cukup mahal kala itu dan tidak semua orang sanggup membelinya.
Lalu sekitar 10 tahun kemudian, saya sudah mampu membeli komputer hasil jerih payah saya sendiri. Komputer dengan logo buah tergigit sedikit yang bisa dibilang mahal dan tidak semua orang sanggup membeli akhirnya berhasil saya miliki berkat perjuangan beberapa tahun menabung. Saat ini, saya sedang di depan komputer itu, lalu iseng browsing internet sambil memutar iTunes dan melakukan Shuffle songs agar iTunes ini bisa memutar musik secara random atau acak. Secara tak terduga, iTunes memutar satu lagu dari album Appetite for destruction dari Guns N’ Roses. Album yang sama yang saya beli 20 tahun lalu sampai sekarang masih terngiang ditelinga dan masih tetap memiliki kekuatan yang sama ketika saya dengarkan pertama kali 20 tahun lalu.
Bedanya kali ini, saya tidak perlu membeli kembali kasetnya, cukup membeli dari iTunes store seharga kira-kira $1 US atau bahkan kurang…bahkan saya sebetulnya bisa mendapatkannya secara gratis nan ilegal.
Dengan harga 1500 Rupiah modal saya membeli kaset itu 20 tahun lalu, ternyata masih berdampak hebat pada saya sampai sekarang dan saya yakin, berdampak sampai akhir hayat nanti.
Sedangkan saya mengeluarkan uang berjuta-juta untuk suatu barang berteknologi tinggi yang akan saya gunakan dan berdampak untuk saya sekitar 3 – 4 tahun saja.
People spent millions for gadgets that last about 3-4 years and spent only 99 cents for a song that will last for a lifetime.
Melakukan pekerjaan di sela-sela kesibukan membuat kita menjadi orang yang sangat sibuk.
Kadang kala, kesibukan itu membuat kita menjadi tidak fokus pada apa yang kita kerjakan karena kita melakukan sambilan, sambil bekerja melakukan kerjaan lain.
Apa hal trendy yang kita lakukan sekarang ini ketika bekerja di depan komputer?
Mendengar musik.
Mendengar musik adalah pekerjaan sambilan untuk menemani kita bekerja.
Artinya, mendengar musik menjadi prioritas ke 9 dari 8 prioritas lain yang kita harus kerjakan.
Tentu kita tidak dapat mengalihkan pandangan mata kita dari Photoshop dan indahnya design Macbook Pro Unibody,
kita juga terpaksa tidak boleh mengalihkan pandangan mata kita dari Microsoft Excel dan kejamnya ratusan ribu virus Windows,
Hal-hal tersebut diatas merubah kebiasaan kita jaman dulu ketika kita pulang kerumah setelah dari toko kaset/CD dan membuka bungkusan kaset/CD untuk kita dengarkan sendiri sambil memejamkan mata dan menikmati musiknya…
>Saya sedang melakukan shuffle iTunes saya hari ini dan secara tiba-tiba, iTunes saya memutar lagu dari SEPULTURA – Beneath The Remains dari album dengan judul sama.
Saya agak terhenyak dan kaget dengan kualitas sound yang begitu dahsyat keluar dari headphone saya. Terpikir untuk napak tilas mendengarkan satu album penuh dengan kondisi dan interpretasi saya sekarang dibanding dulu.
Kembali ke tahun 1989, dimana album ini pertama kali keluar, saya meminjam kasetnya dari teman sekelas saya di SMP waktu itu. Tentu saja, karena waktu itu Metal sedang trend dan saya juga tidak mau ketinggalan jaman dong, hehehe.
Saya sudah menyukai musik Sepultura ketika pertama kali mendengarkannya. Waktu itu, media mendengarkan musik untuk saya adalah kaset dengan mini kompo yang menyatu dengan speaker. Tentu kualitasnya tidak bagus, juga waktu itu saya tidak pernah ngeh mengenai kualitas musik.
Sepultura bukan band sembarang metal. Mereka benar-benar tahu apa yang mereka lakukan. Musik metal yang mereka mainkan bisa dibilang berbeda dengan band-band metal saat itu. Mereka cukup berani melakukan perpindahan chord dan beat dengan extreme tanpa mengurangi intensitas musiknya, hampir mendekati progresif (if you put it that way). Itulah yang membuat mereka menjadi band metal favorit saya dibanding band lainnya waktu itu.
Album ini di produseri oleh Scott Burns dan direkam di studio Nas Nuvens, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Keseluruhan musik di album ini sangat “tight” dengan sound drum dan bass yang padat dan gitar yang heavy. Ketika saya dengarkan lagi sekarang, banyak terdapat detail yang tidak saya perhatikan ketika pertama kali mendengarkannya 20 tahun lalu. Sound gitar Max Cavalera dengan Andreas Kisser sebetulnya mirip, tetapi ketika solo, gitar Andreas seolah mengoyak kepadatan rythm. Lick dan progresi solo Andreas Kisser kadang terasa tidak masuk dan tidak berada di scale yang sama dengan musiknya, tetapi itu yang membuatnya unik.
Tentu saja, haram hukumnya kita membahas Sepultura kalau tidak memberikan kredit kepada Igor Cavalera, sang drummer maha handal yang menjadi tulang punggung band ini menurut saya. Apabila didengarkan dengan seksama, keseluruhan tone dan frekuensi di album ini berada di level frekuensi yang sama, bahkan di beberapa bagian, suara gitar, bass dan kick drum terdengar sama dan tidak ada bedanya, itu karena sangking “tight” hasil mixingnya.
Dari mulai musik, lirik, produksi sound, cover artwork (bikinan Michael Whelan) di album ini semuanya sempurna.
…Oh, dan alangkah bahagianya saya ketika mereka ternyata datang melakukan konser di Jakarta dulu. Saya bahkan sempat meet & greet dan mendapatkan tanda tangan mereka di kaset “Schizophrenia” saya. Mimpi jadi kenyataan.
Tetapi pengalaman saya dengan Sepultura tidak berhenti sampai disitu. Sekitar 10 tahun kemudian, papah memberikan saya gitar Fender Stratocaster yang saya idamkan sejak lama. Setelah ditelusuri, gitar ini dulu milik Irvan, vokalis dan gitaris band ROTOR yang waktu itu menjadi band pembuka Sepultura. Gitar ini juga yang digunakan olehnya waktu itu, dan gitar ini yang saya mainkan sampai sekarang dan saya beri nama “Shirley” =)
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.
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.
