For starting on something, don’t wait until everything
will be just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges,
obstacles and less than perfect conditions. Never be demotivated by those
obstacles and conditions, get started when you have the perfect feeling.
Remember with each step you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more
skilled, more and even more self-confident. Taking first step towards anything
could never be easy, you are on a job, you are starting a carrier or you are creating
your brand new organisation. Nothing comes easy on a start and the things that
are easy would never last long, according to a belief well known to all of us.
Every great man on earth had started with those small and
very small baby steps, he might have failed, he might have been broken, he
might have struggled but what he never did was giving up. That is the only
reason why someone became a big name, news or a history. Twenty years from now
you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do, than by the once you
did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbour and catch the
trade winds in your sails. Struggle, Explore, Dream & Discover, Discover
the hidden you.
Let me make it very clear, there are no guarantees in
life. Even the false security of having a house, a family and money in the back
will pass. So do not hide yourself behind those secure atmospheres and keep
avoiding the consequences that you may face when you try something new. The
greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure. The truth is that we all
fear failures. It’s a learned habit. It is said that the only fears we are born
with are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises, the rest is learned.
There’s nothing wrong with failure. In fact, if you never fail, you will never
grow. Usually we often come thru those lines from a lover ‘I never dared to
tell her about my love, I wish I did’. You don’t know the real thing, when you
did not try for something, you already failed and it is just that no one knows
you actually did. But in your heart, you will always carry the regret of not
trying something and that’s a real failure.
Let me take you towards the inspirational speech of Steve
Jobs (Founder of Apple Inc.), which was dictated by himself to Stanford University
graduates on 12th June 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, it’s 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 it’s 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.
Do you know what it means? If you really wish to grow,
you need to come out of your comfort zone. Almost all of us are suffering
without a cause. The fear of fear is worse than fear itself. It will stop you
from trying something new, it will stop you from growing and possibly it will
stop you from realizing what your real potential is. The key to growth and
success is to let go the fear. It’s first baby step towards anything great that
future holds.
You already read Steve Jobs above and now I will fetch few
words from the recent released Autobiography of Sachin Tendulkar ‘Playing It My
Way’. He says "It was baptism by fire. So much so that after my very first
innings in Test cricket, during which I was all at sea against Wasim and Waqar,
I began to doubt my ability to bat and question whether I was ever going to be
good enough to play at international level," Tendulkar writes in the book.
"What made it (my debut) event more significant was
that we were playing against Pakistan in Pakistan and their bowling attack
included fast bowlers of the quality of Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis
and Aaqib Javed, not to mention the leg-spinners Mushtaq Ahmed and Abdul Qadir
- quite a test for any debutant," he wrote. Writing about his first tour
in Chapter 3, the maestro recalled how the fiery Wasim, then in his prime,
welcomed the youngster to Test cricket. "I was on strike to him for the
third ball of the over, which turned out to be a vicious bouncer. Having
studied Wasim's bowling, I was convinced the next ball would be yorker and was
mentally prepared for it," he said. "It turned out to be another
bouncer, which I left. While I kept expecting a fiery yorker, balls five and
six also turned out to be bouncers, and at the end of the over I said to myself,
'Welcome to Test Cricket'."
The big names, the maestro are at the position because
they did not let the fear rule over them. We all have some unique potential in
ourselves; the only thing that needs to be done is coming out of the comfort
zone and facing your fears.
And after reading the stories of both of the big names
Steve Jobs and Sachin Tendulkar, what I learned is not hiding your own truth.
Steve Jobs faced lots of problems and downfall as well family problems in his
earlier life, yet he was proud to accept it in public. Same is with the maestro
Sachin Tendulkar the record breaker cricketer from Indian Team, he accepted his
fears publically, not only to inspire you and me but because he is not afraid
of his facts.
