and I complain about traffic.

If this doesn't make you cry, you simply aren't capable of that emotion. This poor young man's life is so tragic, you couldn't make a movie out of this that would seem believable.


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The Greatest Generation: 67 years ago

On June 6, as our service men and women are scattered throughout the world defending the freedoms of the greatest nation civilization has ever known, we should be reminded what an unforgiving hell our soldiers faced as they stared evil in the eyes and stormed those beaches in northern France 67 years ago. Not unlike today, we forget the ultimate sacrifices so many have paid so we can burn a flag in protest or scream to the top of our lungs in defiance of our Government. Those aren't actions of courage. Courage is standing shoulder to shoulder with brothers whom you've never met, and as the doors to your boat open to a barrage of gunfire and deafening explosions, you run side-by-side up the sandy blood stained beaches stepping over your fallen brethren. That level of courage is unimaginable. When you're walking through the aiport, standing in line at Subway, walking down the sidealk on the way to your office, tell a soldier thank you. Buy a soldier's lunch. Tell an elderly veteran you haven't forgotten the sacrifices he/she made. Remember just how special America is, and most importantly, never forget the price of freedom.

God Bless America.

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Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

I found this today as I was perusing the internet. I can't remember when I've read something more profoundly inspiring than this commencement address delivered several years ago by Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. I hope you enjoy it half as much as I did.

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 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.

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I'm not sure I believe this, I just don't see the similarities.

Arnold is undoubtedly having a rough week, but we shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions. Maybe this kid isn't his. When this alleged affair started, he was still one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Granted, she's a radiant beauty, but he could've had anyone he wanted. I just don't buy this story. What proof do we have here? All we essentially have is a picture of a little boy that looks 100% undeniably exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Oh, also this kid is like 10 years old and already has 17 inch biceps. Coincidence?...most likely.

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Angelina Jolie > Jennifer Anniston in every way...yes, that way too.

I'm not sure what Jennfier Anniston has been doing, besides sticking pins in the voo-doo dolls of the Pitt-Jolie family, or Sharpie(ing) the teeth black of Angelina Jolie on the latest issue of People Magazine. I kid, maybe, but regardless, I guarantee it hasn't had anything to do with flying to Ramstein Airforce Base in Germany to visit our country's troops. Jolie may be weird, but if you still reference a vile of blood around her neck, or her kissing her brother at the Oscars, 100% you're a girl and 100% you loved Friends and think Jolie "stole" Pitt away from Rachel Green. It's been like a million years and all you hear is Anniston still wallowing in the sorrow of Brad Pitt. Get over it. Sad? Try something constructive with your millions of dollars. Instead of spending the weekends in Cabo at your resort with private security and a thousand bikinis, try building schools and feeding starving children in Africa with your millions. Instead of spending weekends with Oprah at her house (how sad), try going over for the day and spending your "celebrity" with our troops who fight terrorism for sometimes less than 30,000 a year. I couldn't despise Jennifer Anniston more if she were the serpent of death mixed with the souls of the Taliban and syphilis blisters.

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Leo, you S.O.B.

A couple of weeks ago, when average Americans, and Seal Team Six, were busy relishing in the death of the world's most evil man, Leonardo DiCaprio was breaking up with his Israeli supermodel girlfriend of many years. Many thought this would be the girl to tame his unquenchable thirst for beautiful woman. For the record, I am not one of those people. Number one, she just doesn't do it for me. Number two, he is pretty much a bad ass and knows almost all of Victoria's Secrets. I'm not sure if it was the chicken or the egg, meaning was it Blake that caused the break up, but based on her reputation among the circles of Hollywood, you damn right she's the cause. She has loose morals and loves the crap out of being famous and will do just about anything or anybody to stay there. And also, Jesus, she's beautiful. Regardless, it appears Leo agrees cause this week he's in Cannes France, on some yacht, with Blake Freaking Lively. If that doesn't make you want to hate your life nothing will. I would live for two years with the Taliban and OJ Simpson for ten minutes of naked wrestling with Blake Lively.

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Such an emotional dichotomy for me here...

Osama Bin laden is dead. Ironically, I type those words with mixed emotions. Don't get me wrong, he deserved to die, but who am I to make that choice. You see, Bin Laden did just that, he played God twice on US soil (93' 01'), once on the USS Cole, and countless other times around the world. For 20 years or more he's used his fortune to fund global terrorism that although was focused on non Muslims, was not specific to them. For 10 years Bin Laden has been running like a rat, scurrying from cave to cave, country to country, trying to evade the fury of a scorned and battered Lady Liberty. But three days ago, his days of running ended with a single bullet to the head. One single bullet makes the ending to this murderer's saga almost anti-climactic. Like many others around the country, around the world, I'll remember for the rest of my life where I was when I first heard that his days of reigning terror were over. I immediately thought of those whose loved ones didn't get a choice. I thought of that horrific video of those terrified people climbing out of hell and onto the narrow and unforgiving ledge of the Twin Towers billowing smoke on that gorgeous Tuesday morning. I thought of those people on those doomed planes, knowing intuitively that their time on Earth was ending, having the presence of mind to use their phones to leave one last short and simple message of "I Love You" to their spouses answering machine. I thought of those heroic firefighters climbing the stairway to certain death after one building had already collasped in hopes of rescuing just one more innocent victim. I thought of all those mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, that had military personnel show up at their doorstep as they explained that their loved ones wouldn't return. Sunday night, I was proud of our President. I was so proud of the courageous efforts of our entire military, showing resilience and heroism for the last ten years as they fought in a storm of unforgiving terrain and uncertainty. I felt as proud to be an American as I did on September 12, when we stood, unified, on smoking rubble, determined to rise from the ashes. Unfortunately, the elation I felt from ridding the world of it's most prolific and accomplished cancer was short lived. I remember sitting at work on September 11, 2001, watching, as the world was, events unfolding that were beyond comprehension. I watched the streets of New York, D.C., and everywhere else around the country, blend as one. That day, enemies cast their differences aside. Muslims and Jews stood hand in hand with Christians, linking a chain of unified diversity that the world had never seen. I remember the feeling of being proud to be an American. As news of Towers crumbling circled around the world, countries cheered, burning American flags and singing praises of death and destruction. People danced in the streets while we hung up pictures of missing loved ones and wiped away tears from our blackened ashen faces. That was a hatred I couldn't conceptualize. I could only feel sorry for them. I felt sorry that they were so ingrained to be misguided, so ingrained to hate, that they would never have a clear line of sight to reality or real freedom. Freedom. The one word that made our country so special, yet ironically, the one word that caused unprecedented contempt. I felt so lucky to be a part of a nation that after enduring such hellish tragedy and murder, we stood proud, faithful, and focused, regardless of our religions, our skin colors, or our backgrounds. Sunday night, after crowds gathered outside the White House and began to cheer the death of Osama Bin Laden, we began to resemble those countries that left me scratching my head on September 11, 2001. You see, no matter what kind of animal Bin Laden was, as we cheer and chant in celebration, the death and destruction of another human being, we become instantaneously, no better than our enemies. If you closed your eyes, it would be hard to distinguish the difference between the streets of Afghanistan on Sept 11 2001 and Pennsylvania Ave June 2 2011 I know we're better than celebrating death in our streets. We've spent 10 years managing the holes of emptiness left by the callous hands of Bin Laden and his disciples. We've slowly become numb to war, to destruction, and slowly, we've forgotten how badly our souls were wounded that morning in September; however, more important than anything, we can't forget our resolve and our honor. We can't forget what makes us special. We can't allow ourselves to relinquish the hope and freedom that comes with being American, only to replace it with the hatred and contempt of our enemies. Our country deserves better. Its people are better.

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