Steve Jobs a Stanford, 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.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs
12 giugno 2005
Thanks a lot Steve
I still have my first PC, a Mac Classic. A grateful greetings to Steve Jobs who have seized various opportunities in the sky of digital, teaching us to look upwards and forwards.
la rete aperta non è scontata
Come ogni "spazio pubblico" anche la rete è oggetto di contesa, controllo e indirizzi. Chi la vuole aperta, accessibile, condivisa, neutrale e produce valore grazie a questo approccio deve connettersi e avere la consapevolezza/azione di un blocco sociale dell'innovazione.
Hanno ucciso l'orsa Hope, Speranza
Un cacciatore ha ucciso nel Minnesota l'Orsa Hope, che, attraverso la Rete, centinaia di migliaia di persone hanno visto crescere. La sua uccisione fa scandalo e notizia, ma è inutile ogni sfogo collettivo in rete: una catarsi compensativa virtuale. Ora occorre continuare a preoccuparsi di tutti i suoi simili braccati come lei.
Il calendario dell'uomo e quello della Terra
L’ Earth Overshoot Day – Il Giorno del Superamento del Limite è il giorno in cui l’umanità consuma tutte le risorse naturali che il nostro Pianeta ha generato nell’anno solare. Quest’anno abbiamo superato il limite, generando deficit ambientale, il 27 di settembre. Sarebbe una miope consolazione pensare che abbiamo invertito la tendenza perché l’anno scorso il superamento è avvenuto il 21 agosto. Gli scienziati del NEF hanno constatato che dal 1987 il limite non coincideva con la fine dell’anno solare gregoriano, ma venne superato il 19 dicembre. Se consideriamo un po’ di rilevazioni in successione ci possiamo rendere conto che la valutazione dell’impatto ambientale dovrebbe divenire una costante culturale che presiede le nostre scelte e le nostre azioni dai consumi ai rifiuti e non una mitigazione dei grandi progetti ritenuti ineluttabili. 1990: 7 dicembre, 1995: 21 novembre, 2000: 1 novembre, 2005: 20 ottobre, 2007: 26 ottobre, 2008: 23 settembre, 2009: 25 settembre e, come detto, nel 2010 il 21 agosto. Consumiamo il budget, che la Terra ci mette a disposizione annualmente, prima del tempo. Siamo affetti da una irresponsabilità compulsiva. Eppure mai come oggi la connessione interattiva digitale, insieme all’innovazione scientifica e tecnologica, consentono di organizzare diversamente le nostre azioni individuali e collettive. Domotica, infomobilità, rilevazioni pervasive tanto di quello che c’è in magazzino e sugli scaffali, quanto della domanda, della sua provenienza e dei suoi tempi, consentono una ottimizzazione della nostra azione, con una conseguente convenienza economica. Questo vale per la filiera agroalimentare, come per quella energetica e dell’edilizia, piuttosto che per l’accesso ai beni culturali. Si può fare, dipende da noi, occorre scegliere. Non è ineluttabile una produzione energetica fondata su fonti in esaurimento e non sulle rinnovabili, non è ineluttabile l’aumento della congestione da traffico privato a seguito dell’ingombro statico e dinamico generato dalle nostre automobili. Eppure misuriamo la salute dell’industria automobilistica in rapporto all’aumento delle auto vendute rispetto all’anno precedente, e vogliamo forse impedire ai cittadini cinesi di usare il loro aumentato potere economico di acquistare milioni e milioni di nuove auto, con proporzionali consumi di carburante ed emissioni in atmosfera? Rio, Kyoto, Copenaghen, sono le tappe della difficile armonizzazione tra un modello di sviluppo non sostenibile che interessa ormai tutto il Pianeta e i la necessità di limitare ed evitare i suoi effetti devastanti. Ma noi non ci salveremo a seguito di una catastrofe più grossa e diffusa che ci coinvolge direttamente e non come telespettatori: probabilmente sarebbe troppo tardi. Noi si salveremo in virtù di una scelta di valore, con l’esercizio di un’etica della responsabilità verso questo Bene Comune irriproducibile costituito dalla Terra e dalla sua natura. Quando saremo consapevoli che “la Terra ci è data in prestito dai nostri figli “attueremo politiche pubbliche, nell’organizzazione delle città, nella costruzione dei suoi edifici, nella qualificazione di quelli attuali, improntate alla sostenibilità e non alla speculazione finanziaria a scapito delle casse pubbliche, delle risorse naturali e della legalità, con “bolle” pesantissime come l’ipotizzato Ponte sullo Stretto di Messina. Fuori da ogni presuntuosa Hybris rispetteremo i cicli naturali nella relazione tra i tempi storici e i tempi biologici, pensando sempre alle conseguenze di ogni nostra scelta. Così facendo saremo adulti maturi in grado di ben amministrare il budget che ogni anno ci mette a disposizione la nostra “Terra Matria”. Come ha felicemente proposto Edgar Morin di definire quella che dovremmo considerare madre e patria degli animali umani, presenti e futuri.
Amazon e lo sfruttamento dei lavoratori
l'economia, nella società interconnessa digitale, cambia le modalità della produzione di valore ma, senza affermazioni di diritti e i conflitti necessari, non migliora di per sé gli aspetti di giustizia sociale
http://www.wumingfoundation.c
Semaforo Verde per la Rete
domani, Venerdì 23, da non perdere.
Alle 10.00
presso i Chiostri dell’Umanitaria, Sala Auditorium in Via San Barnaba 38
Semaforo Verde per la Rete
Tra gli ospiti: l’inventore e scienziato Francesco Cozzo, Elena Cortesi, Communication & PA Director Ford Italia, David Orban, Fiorello Cortiana, moderati da Marco Montemagno.
Crescere con la rete La Rete come luogo di creazione, e di sviluppo, di un ecosistema compatibile alle problematiche ambientali. Nel web è possibile informare, stimolare discussioni e diffondere idee eco-compatibili, alimentando la nascita di una cultura attenta e sensibile al Pianeta.
Per registrarsi all’evento: http://www.eventbrite.com/eve
Secessione e Costituzione
Il Fatto Quotidiano- Secessione, Reguzzoni: “Popolo è sovrano e sopra Capo dello Stato”. Non è ignoranza della Costituzione è eversione.
Software Libero nella PA
© www.partecipaMi.it, All Rights Reserved.
SEL e Vendola che ignoranza digitale!
Non è l'accordo fatto dalla sua giunta con Microsoft a rendere imbarazzante la scomunica di Vendola al manifesto romano di SEL in omaggio a Jobs. Stanno per approvare una legge per il software libero quindi promuovono il pluralismo informatico. Vendola critica l'uso del simbolo dell'azienda di Jobs come icona della sinistra perché si tratta di una multinazionale. E allora? Dovrebbe criticarne la logica "Walled Garden", ma è la stessa di Facebook su cui pubblica la sua critica, piuttosto che le condizioni di lavoro senza diritti dei cinesi che producono per Apple, ma non è diverso per le altre multinazionali con le quali la sua giunta, comprensibilmente, opera. La verità è che sia il manifesto che la critica ad esso sono un goffo tentativo di cavalcare la generazione digitale, che invece, astutamente, usa, attraversa e aggira i vari giardini murati, i DRM ecc.