How to live before you die
This was a lecture given by Steve Jobs, Apple’s and Pixar’s founder. He gave a speech for some Standford students on their graduating day and told them what he called 3 stories.
The first one was about how he was born and learned to connect the “dots”. Steve Jobs was born from a graduated student whom gave him to adoption. He was only chosen by the second couple and had as a goal of life to graduate from College. But he did not. Instead he just did 6 months of it and then stopped because he thought that he was just wasting his parents money. However he did not dropped out, he went to courses that he was really interested and thought that could improve him as a person, just like calligraphy, for example. This went on for 18 months and then, today, he said that at that time calligraphy was not useful for him, but it gave him, later, the idea to put lots of different fonts for pc users to write. So the first valuable lesson was to follow your instincts and then hope that in the future it will all be connected.
The second one was about love and loss. Steve Jobs said that he loved work with computers and started his own company (Apple) and 10 years later it was a huge success, but then he was fired. Although he was feeling lost, he had the certain that he still loved working with computers and then, all the pressure he felt being and director from a company changed into lightness, because he was a beginner again and could be creative and free. He founded Pixar and Next, and got married. The first one is, today, a huge success. The second one was bought by Apple and he returned to it. So the second big lesson was: choose your work as you choose your lovers, because it takes a huge time of your life and you could not handle the sadness when it come if you do not love it. And if you have not found what you really like to do, do not settle.
The last and third story was about death. He began saying that you have to try to live each day as it was your last, but one day it will be true, and besides everybody knows that one day we are all going to die, no one wants it. And then he told about being diagnosed with a pancreatic cancer. The doctors said that he would have just 3 months to resume his affairs. Aka, to him organize his life in order to die. But then he did a biopsy and the doctor found out that his cancer could be cured with surgery and then he was saved. But then he realized that death was the most intelligent thing created by nature to renew, and that is everybody’s and everything’s fate. So the big lesson of this story was: live your own life. Do not let yourself be trapped by society’s notion. And then he ended his speech saying: stay young, stay foolish.
I think that all he said makes perfect sense. He lived a so dramatic life in all aspects and I am certain that he was surely on the edge on every aspect of what he said. I try to follow myself for sometime the same basic concepts of his speech. For example, I did graduate from Biology, although my parents wished were that I had became a doctor. And I choose this profession with the age of 12. Moreover I really did study Japanese (I even have a Proficiency degree) for 2 years, although I did not connect the dots yet, I found a huge pleasure, not in read and write in the proper sense of the word, but it was through the language that I learned the Japanese habits and their life philosophy (not that I put it into practice, but I wanted just to have the knowledge). Maybe the last concept is the hardest to understand because everybody has obligations and we could not live our life as we were in vacation, but we have to find small daily things that make it worth.
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