Steve Jobs Commencement speech at Stanford mentioning HARE KRISHNA

[Guest guest]

Hare Krishna

 

I thought you may be interested in the attached article as it mentions Steve

jobs took prasadam at ISKCON temple and he talks about karma ,death to

students.

 

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

 

ys

 

skdas

 

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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 as 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 they 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

retuned 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 other’s 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 yourself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that

for you. stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

 

Thank you all very much.