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 its 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 a new, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

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.

You’ve got to find what you love, Steve Jobs – Part 3

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, its 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.

Read the second story

Read the third story

The very reason for us being born again and again is due to the latent desire of the soul, which is to get free from the meshes and shackles of life. To be salvaged… to be liberated…

We subconsciously seek permanency in everything we do, achieve, and experience. The very phenomenon of a temporary world full of illusion, where the mind switches gears every nano second just wanting more and more, leaves us dissatisfied and disappointed. The speed of change builds stress.. The nature of change brings anxiety, hankering for fulfilment takes us in wrong directions. So our real yearning is for that which is constant. The bliss quotient can either be a conscious quest seeking the ultimate truth or it could be a calling from within.

Shut your eyes, withdraw your senses, disconnect with the outside and make yourself open and vulnerable for oneness with the existence, take a few deep breaths and breathe out equally deep. Now open your eyes and continue.. and the seeker become sought, as the famous sufi poet Rumi said, “I’ve been living on the lip of insanity, asking questions, knocking at the door… the door opens – I’ve been knocking from inside.”

To reach a point of total freedom breathing easy and relaxed, are you ready to fly? For starters, let us mingle with nature and its elements, like sitting by the sea and absorbing the energy of its waves; squatting in the garden and appreciating the creativity’s finest aesthetics; finding a quiet corner in a temple, and feeling connected within; lying down below the open sky and experience its vastness; listening to the chirping of the birds and tuning in with the rhythm of nature; inhaling the fragrance of fruits, flowers or mud and breathing out all the physiological, psychological and emotional toxins. Or simply shut your eyes in any quiet corner and start breathing in and out very slowly and smoothly in rhythm and harmony.

Breathing in the subtle and super energy and breathing out gross and subtle tensions and stress. You can do it for as long and as many times a day, till you completely blank out and empty yourselves, delving into your deepest recesses. Some call this meditation. These endeavours will release you gradually from the entrapments and you will be enslaved no more to life.. and your ticked to the primary flight is earned.

As much we need to be deeply relaxed in the state of restful awareness, we need to be extremely alert as well; which should be a perfect togetherness of dynamic stillness and profoundly passive alertness; to flow and cooperate with life and not react to it, respond and not giving resistance to it and not obstruct it. Then we become the co-creators of this existence, liberated with creative juices. This gives us extreme power of transformation alchemy. All transformations and transcendence happen in contrast of deepest relaxation and extreme alertness together; in this state one can experience immense sense of freedom, liberation of energy thoughts, words, deeds and infinite creativity making you the alchemist.

This gives you wings for a higher flight, a sense of freedom and a hope of never ending vastness which is the immeasurable potential of all that was, is, and will be. This is truly and simply, how great people become extraordinary quite simply, in the quest of simple truth!

Should you wish to have eternal wings to fly with ecstasy celebrating your own being and the being of existence cultivate these five points of inner beauty

Compassion
Be unconditionally and selflessly loving and love even those you don’t love you.

Benevolence
Be kind even to those who are not kind to you.

Philanthrophy
From love to empathy, from wealth to service, and from forgiving yourself to forgiving others be magnanimous

Grace
Accepting life as it is with grace and responding to it with simply grace

Creativity
From harmony to abundance, from bonding and creating joy of life to every aspect of life

This is a process and shall be achieved with the passage of time only if you attend to life in profound state of consciousness, witnessing it as it passes by without judging it. Difficult though, but certainly possible only if you will it.

1. Always, when leaders say that the people are not following, it’s the leaders who are lost, not the people.
2. Leaders get lost because of isolation, delusion, arrogance, plain stupidity, etc., but above all because they become obsessed with imposing their authority, instead of truly leading.
3. Incidentally, leading is helping people achieve a shared vision, not telling people what to do.
4. It is not possible for a leader to understand and lead people when the leader’s head is high in the clouds or stuck firmly up his backside.
5. That is to say – loyalty to leadership relies on the leader having a connection with and understanding of people’s needs and wishes and possibilities. Solutions to leadership challenges do not lie in the leader’s needs and wishes. Leadership solutions lie in the needs and wishes of the followers.
6. The suggestion that loyalty and a following can be built by simply asking or forcing people to be loyal is not any basis for effective leadership.
7. Prior to expecting anyone to follow, a leader first needs to demonstrate a vision and values worthy of a following.
8. A given type of leadership inevitably attracts the same type of followers. Put another way, a leadership cannot behave in any way that it asks its people not to.
9. In other words, for people to embrace and follow modern compassionate, honest, ethical, peaceful, and fair principles, they must see these qualities demonstrated by their leadership.
10. People are a lot cleverer than most leaders think.
11. People have a much keener sense of truth than most leaders think.
12. People quickly lose faith in a leader who behaves as if points 10 and 11 do not exist.
13. People generally have the answers which elude the leaders – they just have better things to do than help the leader to lead – like getting on with their own lives.
14. A leadership which screws up in a big way should come clean and admit their errors. People will generally forgive mistakes but they do not tolerate being treated like idiots by leaders.
15. And on the question of mistakes, a mistake is an opportunity to be better, and to show remorse and a lesson learned. This is how civilisation progresses.
16. A leader should be brave enough to talk when lesser people want to fight. Anyone can resort to threats and aggression. Being aggressive is not leading. It might have been a couple of thousand years ago, but it’s not now. The nature of humankind and civilisation is to become more civilised. Leaders should enable not obstruct this process.

The person at a number one position sleeps less, eats less and his peace of mind disappears. Blood pressure, sugar, anxiety, restlessness and palpitation, suddenly become a part of this rich man’s world. In addition, he is left with no inspiration and no one to look up to and achieve a different, much higher target. Not merely he, his entire family bears the brunt of him being at number one position. A self-acquired responsibility dominates his mind almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 52 weeks in a year.

On the other hand, imagine the condition of the person who is at number two position. Apart from a little pain of not being at number one position, he is much relaxed and happier. He knows that he can get away with few things as there is a senior above him to take responsibility. He has a well nourished ambition to become number one and he works hard for it. He has a strong credibility attached, as people around him know that still has to reach top and will not spoil his position or reputation. He enjoys an easy life with family and friends. All he needs is to concentrate on his present job, work hard, be honest and dedicated and things would automatically fall in his way. If you have played the game of chess, you would understand the value of ‘Vazir’ who is considered number two in the game but is sometimes even more important than the number one, the kind. Once the ‘Vazir’ is killed, half of the game is won by the opponent. The ranks are in the same order. At times, the number two play a far more important and stronger role in an organisation, than the number one. The dependency of number one on number two makes the later the ‘Vazir’ of the organization without which the ‘King’ is incomplete and fears losing a battle.

This does not imply that one should not strive to become number one. This article is for those who are aiming at becoming number one but they are somehow are not able to achieve the position. Do not worry. There is a famous ad line ‘We are at number two we work hard’. Your efforts are duly recognized by everyone and especially those who fear that someday you would become number one, so be happy.

If you think you’re unable to work for the best company in its sphere, make it your aim.

If you think you’re incapable of running a company, make that your aim.

If you think you’re unable to be on the cover of Time magazine, make it your business to be there.

Make your vision of where you want to be a reality.

Nothing is impossible.

Quite good.

Good.

Very Good.

The best in our field.

Or the best in the world?

Talent helps, but it won’t take you as far as ambition. Everybody wants to be good, but not many are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great.

To many people, being nice in order to be liked is more important. There’s equal merit in that, but you must not confuse being good with being liked.

Most people are looking for a solution, a way to become good. There is no instant solution, the only way to learn is through experience and mistakes.

You will become whoever you want to be.

It’s not how good she was that mattered, it’s how good she wanted to be. What is interesting in her quote is that she didn’t compare herself with George Michael or Mariah Carey, rather she saw the fame of Persil Automatic as her yardstick.

Laugh at it as you may, it’s this highly original imagination that got her where she is today.

- We always end up setting outcome goals instead of performance goals. For instance, you might set a goal of achieving 80% in your exam. This is an outcome goal. Instead you need to set a goal, which is performance oriented. For example, trying your best to achieve 80%. The outcome may often not be in your hands, but our performance most definitely is. Fail to achieve goals for reasons outside your control can be very dispiriting and may lead to loss of enthusiasm and feelings of failure.

- Goals can be unrealistically high. When a goal is perceived to be unreachable, no effort will be made to achieve it. Set realistic goals. For example, if an average student sets a goal of achieving 90%, it is very unlikely that he will be able to achieve this goal.

- Conversely, goal can be set so low that you feel no challenge in achieving it, making the goal a waste of time. Always set goals that are challenging. For instance, many students aim to get only passing marks, when in fact, they have the capacity of doing much better.

- At times, goals can be so vague that they are useless: It is difficult to know whether vague goals have been achieved. If achievement cannot be measured, then your self-confidence will not benefit from goal setting, nor can you observe progress towards a greater goal. Therefore, set precise quantitative goal. A common example is “doing better” in the exam. We must specify or define what the child means by “doing better”. Why do you think most schools have four exams in a year? One reason is to help the students know where they stand, so that they can set goals accordingly as well as measure their achievement.

- Goal setting can be unsystematic. Here goals will be forgotten, achievement of goals will not be measured and feedback will not occur into new goals. The major benefits of goal settings have been lost. Be organized and regular in the way that you use goal setting.

- Setting too many unprioritized goals can lead to feeling of overload. Remember, we all deserve time to relax and enjoy. Go one step at a time and set the next goal only after the first have been achieved.

By avoiding these problems and setting goals effectively, you can achieve and maintain strong forward momentum.