Lincolnshire Lager No More

Two entries in one day. This must be a personal record.

I just got home from a department happy hour at the local micro brewery near work. The happy hour itself was a fun time for everyone to let loose on a Friday afternoon, but the service at the brewery left less than desired. Our Senior VP told us that he was picking up the tab for all of our beers. When the waitress brought me my beer, she asked me whether I was going to pay cash or start a tab. I told her that a tab was already existent for the 5 tables of people who were there. She insisted that there were no open tabs and that I would have to pay cash for the beer. Of course I didn't believe her, but fine, I gave her my money. About twenty minutes later, she came by and said, "Oh somebody has started a tab, so all the following rounds will be on that tab." I'm pretty sure that the tab was always open but that she was just mistaken and unaware of it. And her final statement about someone finally opening a tab was just her way to cover up for her mistake. Because of all her attitude and her insistance on the fact that there was no tab previously opened, I left her no tip. I initially felt bad about it, but quickly got over it. I thought that the customer was always right. Whatever happened to those days?

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Below is the text of the commencement address by Steve Jobs delivered on June 12, 2005 to graduates at Stanford. I know that a lot of graduation speeches are trite and overly sugar coated; but as I read this, I realized that I had become a cynic to all of it and that was the wrong attitude. Everything that is stated in this speech is a little trite, but it's so true. For all you that are frustrated or dissatisfied with something in your life, now is the time to speak up and to make a change. I know that after reading this, I have started to make small steps to restore my faith in so many things that I thought I had once lost on this crazy journey called life. Hopefully, this will inspire all of you to do the same.

"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.

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 retuned 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 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 other's 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. "

Blubbering Like a Fool

I don't know what's come over me recently, but I've been succumbed to tears after watching various television commerical and movies. Take for example the commerical that I saw last night. I'm not sure if any of you have seen it, but I'll do my best to describe it.

The commerical is one of many in a series used to advertise the vast line of credit cards that Chase (Manhattan still?) Bank has to offer. In one commercial, it shows a man as he evolves through significant stages of his life and the various rewards cards that he uses to pay for things. This one didn't make me cry as much as it just gave me this warm tingly feeling in my stomach. The idea of meeting someone, falling in love, and spending a lifetime together just warmed my stomach and made me feel incredibly happy and lucky.

But the one that really gets to me is the Chase commercial where it shows a father and a daughter preparing for a wedding. As the daughter is trying on her wedding dress in the store, you see dad holding his credit card and watching his beautiful daughter. The commercial goes on to show all the other preparations involved in the wedding -- the decorations, the walk down the aisle, the first dance, etc. Interspersed with all these scenes are flash back scenes of the father and the daughter involved in almost the exact actions. I realize that this is not the most descriptive blurb, but you would recognize what I was talking about if you saw it.

Anyway, I think that I blubber when I see this commercial because it makes me think of the relationship that I have with my dad. I've always been Daddy's Little Girl. Whether it was trips to museums or ball parks, family vacations across the US, or just hours spent watching basketball games on tv, there wasn't anything that my dad and I didn't enjoy together. As I think about my own future wedding date, it brings tears to my eyes to think that I'll be leaving the first man that I loved for another.

Happy Father's Day!

Eternally Pregnant or Home to a Tapeworm

Is it weird to have weighed the same exact weight for the past decade? Don't get me wrong. My weight fluctuates plus or minus 5 pounds everyday, but it's usually always in the same ballpark. And it's been this weird since I was in high school. The only thing that's weird about that is the fact that I eat like a cow. I seriously need about 6 meals to sustain energy all day. When I don't eat, I start feeling weak and cranky. I'm not a pleasant sight at all. Just ask my co-workers. Some of them have even seem me slumped over at my desk due to hunger pains.

I don't understand the grown men at my company who eat only a Lean Cuisine tv dinner for lunch. Those things are like appetizers to me. There is NO way that something that small could keep me satiated all day. I eat a fairly large lunch everyday and I still find myself snacking throughout the day. My parents and Ben are horrified by the amount of food that I eat when I go home and have dinner with them. I'm pretty certain that Mom and Dad don't think that I ever eat. Mikers and Vivien are also usually fairly horrified by the amount of food that I eat. Whenever I go out with either of them, I'm usually in a state of food coma post-meal. One time, Vivien even felt the desire to tell our waiter at Pizza Metro that I was capable of packing away a lot of food. He just looked blankly at both of us. But I'm pretty sure that Law McGraw can attest most to my eating habits. There have been several occassions where I have fallen into a deep food coma after a meal with him. I'm apparently a barrel of fun and more. Luckily, he's the sweetest guy in the world and he just lets me sleep it all off.

Now, one would think that I would be extremely fat based on my 6 meals a day and my knack for napping post-meal. Fortunately, my metabolism is super good and seems to counter all my meals. We'll see what happens once I've had my first child. So I've come up with my own theories on the situation. (1) I must be eternally pregnant if I need 6 substantial meals to get through the day or (2) I have a tapeworm named Henry who is my other half and actually digests most of my meals. Regardless, most people eat to live, but I seem to live to eat.

5...4...3...2...1...

Day 5 of 93. I definitely thought that it was going to be easier than this. I don't know how people do this for years on end. I miss Law McGraw a lot.

Also 66 days left until the GMAT. Let's all pray that somehow I master the art of Data Sufficiency sometime before then. Can I someday create a test that everyone has to take in order to get into graduate school, yet seriously does not predict performance at all? What a fabulous business. I have to hand it to those people at ETS.

Who would have thought that my life could be full of so many countdowns? One will definitely lead to a fabulous reward. The other may only bring temporary relief until the next countdown.