Third Story of Steve Jobs - 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.

Thank you all very much.

Second Story of Steve Jobs - 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.

First Story of Steve Jobs - 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.

Answer is still the same - NO!!(:

I am packing my bags to go back to Hyderabad. It was fun to be with parents and friends but every journey has an end. But I am leaving Delhi with a light of happiness in heart though at the same time I am sad.

The purpose of this trip was to be with friends and visit Golden temple. But I will not deny, I came to Delhi with an idea to take an opinion for my medical condition. I got my reports to be assessed by doctors in Delhi as somewhere I wanted to know if they have some treatment for me. But the fact remains the same and so was their answer – NO.

I do not know how to react but yes somewhere some hope is diminishing. As per the doctors also sooner I accept, better for me. I have accepted what I am heading to but like many of you, I also wanted to explore if there is some treatment that can give life – the feeling of life.

I think whatever happens is for good. So I will put the reports back in my bag and just dump them once I reach Hyderabad. I do not want to get into the mode of more investigations as Delhi doctors have advised. I am fed up and I just want to be out of all this mess.

Here are few lines from Steve Jobs’ inspirational speech at Stanford University that give me a new direction to live life. So back to home and work with a smile!

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it by 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”.

Cheerio

Happy Vijayadashami!

It is a pleasure to be in Delhi at the time of Vijayadashami. Every state has a different way of celebrating the same day.

 In most of northern India and some parts of Maharashtra, Dasha-Hara is celebrated more in honour of Rama. During these 10 days many plays and dramas based on Ramayana are performed. These are called Ramlila. There are outdoor fairs and large parades with effigies of Ravana (a mythical king of ancient Sri Lanka), his brother Kumbhakarna and son Meghanad. The effigies are burnt on bonfires in the evening. After Dasara, the hot summer ends, especially in North India. The onset of cold weather is believed to encourage infections. The burning of the effigies, filled with firecrackers containing phosphorus, supposedly purifies the atmosphere, while the temples perform Chandi Homa or Durga Homa, with the same intent.

I am awaiting for the evening events of Dashara in Delhi.  It is a day to celebrate victory of good over bad!

The more important message is to kill our bad attributes to be good to others. 

Passage to Amritsar – My Jab We Met!

This is the most interesting incident of my life. It has been 9 years, I have never travelled in a train. What have been the reason, maybe I have travelled more internationally until 2006 and then working for corporate sector kept me hooked with more of project deadlines. As a result, I never got a chance to take long breaks and travel in a train. Honestly, I have no clue how to reserve a train ticket also. I am so bad at rail reservations. How can I say that?

I am the best person to write around this. I got my tickets done for Amritsar on 30^th September, 2011. Like always our tickets were not confirmed and till the day we were supposed to board, our tickets were not confirmed. The last message that I heard before leaving for New Delhi Station was – The chart is prepared and your are in the waitlist on numbers – 2,3 and 4. In short, our trip has to be cancelled as there was no scope that we can board this train. Though my cab was waiting down as I was sure no matter what happen, one last try, I will visit the station and try to convince the TT. So like always being highly positive we reached the station. The train was right in front of me with the charts that do not have our names. LOLJ

For a second, I felt there is no hope that I can reach Amritsar but then let me try. I went to the TT room and asked my parents to wait till I come back. There were 4 TTs in the room and my request did not fell on their ears. One asked me to talk to the other and like that I spoke to all 4 of them but I FAILED. A BIG NO.

My mind was not responding and we were left with 4 minutes before the train leaves the station for Amritsar. My heart was beating fast as I could see how hard journey I had from Hyderabad to Delhi just to visit Golden temple. But things were not in my favour. Finally, just 2 minutes left and I do not what came to my mind and I threw my luggage into the train and just boarded.  I asked my parents to board and that I will manage. Actually, there was no plan in my mind until I saw an attendant staring at me and I thought he is my jack for the day. If I play him right we will get the seats. BINGO!

It worked. I requested him and he said – “Mam, you can sit and we will manage”. Manage means ‘some’ money here and there. It worked and we reached Amritsar. I know what I did was not ethical but there was no other way out. I just know one thing – I know what I want and it depends how I get it too. But for me it matters that I HAVE TO GET WHAT I WANT!!

I had two great days at Amritsar with loads of fun and travel.

Thanks Babaji…my train journey was so much like Jab We Met.!

I have uploaded all the pics on my Fb for my FB friends...I am tired and tomorrow have to wake up early to burn all the extra calories:)

Gud nite!

3 Days In Delhi : From Soul to Heart....(::)

Time really flies. From Hyderabad Biryani to Delhi Samosa….(life is so tangy, spicy and yummy). It has been three days here but I am still so much hyderabadi at heartJ

But yes these three days have been like a flash back for me, visiting my old ancestral house at Naraina Vihar to flashing malls at different places in Delhi/NCR, things and people have changedJ.

I am very emotional about few things and my home at Naraina that is like a chocolate cake with a red cherry is so much close to my heart. I have spent 7 years in that house and those years were years of struggle and just struggle. The place taught me to be humble and calm but today when I stand and see my house, I have changed tooJ

I think change is the spice of life and my life wanted me to change. When I looked at my house, I scanned through myself from top to bottom and I see a different lady who lost oodles of pounds, who is now no more into salwars and who is practical towards life. But then when I closed my eyes, I could remember that innocent girl who used to walk to her school in a skirt that can surely touch her ankles. I could see a girl who used to walk from college to tuition classes to earn extra money for her education. I could see a girl who left her home in search of jobs during her graduation so that she can fund her education. I did everything from sales girl job to tuitions, from making websites to event management to accomplish my studies. But the moment, I open my eyes, I see a fancy home that is just now the way I left it. All the people around my old home have either shifted or could not recognize me. As I said I have changed too. A thin 32 years old lady in her blue jeans and black top is definitely not the same as they saw me 6 years back when we sold our home for a bigger or maybe better place.

But I am glad my neighbours could identify me. A coconut burfee (Indian sweets) remind me of how badly I need to explore food when I am in Delhi. Who Kahata hain, Delhi aaye aur mithai nahi kayee.

Meeting school and college friends have added one more feather to my cap.

So I decided and my decision is still the same, I will munch on all the specialties of Delhi. I have tried some of the things that are not on my diet chart. I had kulfi and kulchas with makhani dal to lavish creamy paneer. My soul says ‘sinful food is good when on vacation’. I am sure, I have gained 2 kgs but I will workout once I am back. I will workout like a maniacJ

I am missing Hyderabad and my classes (definitely, kickboxing also).

Today, I am heading to Amritsar. My dream to see Golden temple will come true. I have no wishes or desires to ask God but just one request that I hope my God knows and will fulfill it. I have a big shopping list that I need to complete like any virgoJ

I am excited and happyJ

So until I am back….CheerioJ and love you all!