Today's article I dedicate to the inspirational visionary and pioneer of the modern electronic world in Steve Jobs; who passed away yesterday at the age of 56.
I am doing this by taking some excerpts from his Stanford speech which remains to most of us... one of inspirational speeches of recent times...
CONNECTING THE DOTS:
"If I had never dropped out of college, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they now do."
It is impossible to connect the dots looking forward, 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.
LOVE & LOSS:
"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.
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.
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.
During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar. 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."
Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. Be convinced that the only thing that keep you going is that you love what you do. 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.
DEATH:
"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
"About a year ago, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty that death is 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. 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.
