Thursday, July 31, 2008

Indigestion From Panty Hose

're crazy Test

defeats in life are the best place. Why force us to think differently and creatively. The credo of the head of Apple


I tell you three stories from my life. That's it, nothing exceptional: only three stories. The first story is about something I call 'connect the dots' of a lifetime. As a boy, I dropped out of college, out of Reed College after the first semester. I continued to follow some courses informally for another year and a half, then I'm gone completely. Why did I do? it all started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college student when she became pregnant and decided to give me up for adoption. He wanted me to be completely adopted by a couple of graduate students, and made sure everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. But when I arrived, the couple - at the last minute - said he wanted to adopt a girl. So, what then would become my parents, and were in second place on the waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "Is there a baby boy, not provided. The do you want? ". They said: "Certainly." My biological mother later found out that this couple had not graduated: she had never finished college and the man had not even graduated from high school. Then my biological mother refused to sign the final adoption papers. Then he relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. This was the beginning of my life.

So, as promised, several years later, in 1972, I went to college. But I naively chose a college too expensive, and all the savings of my parents ended up paying me for the tuition. After six months I could not find any real opportunities. I had no idea what I wanted do with my life and how college could help me understand. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved from working for a lifetime.


So I decided to let go and trust that everything would be fine.

was very difficult time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

When I left college, I stopped to take courses that did not interest me and begin to enter the classes that I found most interesting.

It was not all rosy, though. I did not have a dorm room, and I was forced to sleep on the floor of the chambers of my friends. Earned money to the seller bringing the empty bottles of Coca-Cola for five cents deposit and I can buy food. Once a week, on Sunday evening, I walked for seven miles across town to finally have a good meal at the Hare Krishna temple, the only one of the week. But much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and my intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you an example.

: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy courses in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was hand written with beautiful calligraphy. Because I had dropped courses officers, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about the characters with and without the 'thanks', I knew the difference between the spaces that separate the different letter combinations, including what makes a great typography. It was wonderful, in a way that science can offer, because it was beautiful, but also artistic, historical, and I found it fascinating.

None of these things, however, had no hope of finding a practical application in my life. But then, ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it for the Mac was the first computer with advanced typographic capabilities. If I had not left the normal classes and then I had not in on that single course, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced different. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it is likely that there would be any personal computer with those capabilities. If I had not dropped out of college, I could never in on this calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Certainly, at the time when I was in college it was impossible for me to 'connect the dots' looking to the future. But it became very, very clear ten years later, when I could watch backwards.
short, it is possible to 'connect the dots' looking ahead, you can only join them later, looking back. Thus, one must always trust that somehow, in the future, the dots will. We must believe in something, our gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Why believe that eventually will join the dots will give us the confidence to follow our hearts even when this will take us away from the roads safer and predictable and will make a difference in our lives. This approach has never let me walk, and instead, 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 my life. Steve Wozniak and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20 years. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple has become - from quell'aziendina with two guys in a garage that was at the beginning - a company from $ 2 billion with more than 4 000 employees.

In 1985 - I had just turned 30 years and a few months ago we released our finest creation, the Macintosh - 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 things went very 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 missing and I was completely devastated.

For some months I did not know what to do. I felt like I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs to me as if I had dropped the baton was being passed to me. It was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from Silicon Valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed a bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

not I realized then, but the fact of having been fired from Apple was the best thing that could happen. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me, allowing me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the five years I started a company named NeXT, another named Pixar, and fell in love with a 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. My wife Laurene and I have a wonderful family. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I had not been fired from Apple. was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

Sometimes life hits you like a brick on his head. We must not lose faith, though. I am convinced that the only thing that kept me going was the love for what I did. You have to find what we love. And this applies to both our business and our affections. Our work to fill a large part of our lives, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what we believe to be a good job. And the only way to do a good job is to love what we do. Who still has not found, must continue to seek. Do not settle. With all my heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like all great love stories, it just gets better and better as the years pass. Therefore, we have to continue looking until you have not found. Without being satisfied.
The 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 definitely be right." Impression on me, and since then, over the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked: "If today were the last day of my life, I do what I am about to do today?". And whenever the answer is no for too many days in a row, I understand that something must be changed.

remind me that I will die soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations of eternity, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remember that we die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. We are already naked. There is no reason, therefore, not to follow our hearts.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I did the CAT scan at seven-thirty in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. Before I did not know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me that it was a cancer that was almost certainly incurable type, I would die within the next three, at most six months. So it would be better if I put my affairs in order (which is the code to tell the doctors prepare to die). It means to tell your kids in a few months everything you thought you could tell them in ten years. This means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that your family is as simple as possible. It means to say your goodbye.

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

This was the time when I went closer to death and I hope its the one for a few decades. Having lived through it, now I can talk with a little 'more certainty than when death for me was just an abstract concept

Nobody wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven, not really want to die to get there. But death is the destination we all have in common. No one has ever escaped it. It is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of life. is the agent of change in life. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Our time is limited, so we must not waste it living someone else's life. Let us not be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Do not let the noise of others' opinions drown out our inner voice. And, most important of all, we must have the courage to follow our hearts and our intuition. Somehow, they know what we really want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was incredible that a newspaper was called 'The Whole Earth Catalog', one of the bibles of my generation. was created by Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and Stewart had put it to life with his poetic touch. was the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid. was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before there was Google: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions concepts.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of 'The Whole Earth Catalog' and when they arrived at the end of their journey, they released the latest issue. It was more or less the mid-seventies. On the last page of that final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind of street where you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish ', Be Foolish. It was their farewell message. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish: I myself have always wished that for myself. And now I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

L'Espresso - translated by Antonio Dini
(December 27, 2006)