Off Golf, Dogs and everything after…

There are few pleasures in life which are as dramatic as a child getting his first taste of an aerated drink. Be as it may, a significant contributor to childhood obesity and tooth decay, it is still one of the most memorable tastes a child acquires as he grows up. And the first drink is always special. Unlike your first drink ‘drink” and the discovery of the secret realms of alcohol which almost certainly ended up in you being wasted, the first aerated drink is an experience akin to nirvana…and for little Maddy, it was no different. I was fortunate to have been in close quarters (read – I gave him the drink) when he got his first taste of the forbidden liquid. His face almost immediately started to emote in ways hitherto unknown. From the initial “Hello..what is this?” leading to the “Damn where have you been hiding all this time” to the climatic “I will never forgive my folks for keeping me off this, this long” is a chain of expressions too profound to be summed up in the 26 alphabets queens English allows us. That afternoon, by the pool, Maddy discovered one of the first forbidden pleasures of life. One of the few that he will experience over the course of his life. Having been a part of that experience for little Maddy, I can only wish that he continues to be surprised by new and exciting tastes that life will pitch fork his way and that may each taste evoke similar reactions of delight and sublime joy.

After having known my father for 38 years now, I still sometimes feel that I haven’t seen or experienced all of him. This October, as he turns 71 (on October 28th), I am tempted to look back and see what I discovered about my father when. Its a strange feeling and as I write this, I realize, that both of us have grown up in this period – me from a child to an awkward youth to a mildly confident 38 year old and he from a 33 year old quiet and introvert young man to a tremendously driven and focused middle aged man to now a brilliant poet, thinker, speaker and an amazingly loving and caring senior citizen. (I don’t dare call him an old man..in all probability he can still outrun, out think and most definitely out play me in a game of tennis). So here goes, my most memorable times with my father…

My first defining memory of him is from when I must have been 15 Years old. We were playing our local tennis clubs “Father and Son” event. Having made it to the Finals of the event, we were to play a gentleman called Jagnani and his son Shrikant. Now this Marwari gentleman, was a pretty good tennis player and had always been one of the better players in my dads group. He had always had that chip on his shoulder about being a superior player and had mannerisms which made it easy to dislike him. I knew my dad wasn’t particularly fond of him and would have enjoyed beating him. But just as the match started, I realized how singularly intent my dad was on doing that. Shrikant and I were more or less at the same standard but he had a well known weakness of temperament and we played that to a hilt. We made the father almost a passenger in the game and completely played the son. Needless to say, we won the match and for the first time I saw a very competitive side of my father. I thoroughly enjoyed the moment and the prize we won (a pair of bath towels) though never on the mantle always stayed in my mind.

The second memory is actually not a single event but a collection of events from the time when I was working with him in the factory. He always gave the impression of being very aware of the situation. His ability to see through seemingly innocuous events and people and also so accurately preempt situations was almost unreal. He was always 2 steps (and sometimes miles) ahead of everyone else. His business philosophies (the most famous one being – “Never get involved in servicing bad business because it will only cause you to miss the good business when it comes by”) were so simple and strong and always so correct. Every day with him at work was like a month in a business school. He was a natural mentor to all of us who worked with him. Today when I look back at those times, I realize, he did not employ people or enter into business deals with companies, he won them over. People were just happy to be led by him and work with him. Our vendors would never stop telling me what a pleasure it was to work with the company (and they do even today) and most of our customers too were extremely happy to work with us. This was such a good lesson for me later as I worked on building my own company and to this day I often find myself going to him for advise on matters and situations that I am sure he has never faced in his entrepreneurial journey.

My third memory of my father is from a time when I was going through a particularly bad phase in my IT company. We had just lost our only client which had left our 35 odd employees with no work. Everyone advised me to get out with whatever money I had made (and it was sizable for that time). I was also very tempted to do the same. After all I had made a neat little sum and had a lot to go back to doing. However, when I discussed this with father he had a completely different view. He pointed out the futility of money and explained the joys of re-building (something he has mastered) and giving it your all and still not calling it a day. It changed my whole approach to building the business and taught me the value of being in it for the long haul.

As he turns 71, I think in his mind he is still 17. His goals, ambitions and pursuits all have the spirit of a 17 year old just getting ready to enjoy the best years of his life. The saying of wine getting better with age could have been said just for him. I wouldn’t say I have experienced what Mark Twain did when he said – “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years”, but I would like to add that when I turned 38, I realized my father was a genius and I am fortunate to have lived and learnt in his times and so close to him. I sometimes wonder how difficult it will be to ever be the father to my son that he was to me

At 71, he continues to get stronger and better. I keep thinking of the next big discovery I will make about him and know in my heart (as the famous Shah Rukh Khan said in one of his movies)..Picture abhi baaki hai dost

Boris is no more….the big guy was put to sleep after a prolonged fight with skin cancer. He went gracefully and peacefully much like how he lived his life. For those that had met Boris, he was the gentlest of dogs with only his size suggesting the degree of ferocity commonly associated with German Shepherds. My father aptly called him the “wise old sage”. He sat around the house quietly watching us go through our daily chores almost mocking us with the peace that he seemed to have found inside him. A very severe ear infection had left Boris all but deaf towards the last few years of his life which I suspect further contributed to his peacefulness. He heard little and said even less. Content to communicate as and when absolutely needed. Towards his last few days he must have been in tremendous pain but never displayed it in anyway but for an odd wince or two when medicine was applied over his wounds.

He lived his 13 years well. Better than many of us will live our share of whatever is allocated to us. If I could, I would inscribe on Boris’s grave..”Born a Dog..Died a saint”

I was behaving like I did on my first day out to the college. The nervous edgy feeling about having forgotten something or being under prepared and over dressed in someway. It was my first Golf Tournament after having been at the sport for close to 2 years now. For someone who has played competitive Tennis (and I daresay been pretty good at it) and coming from a family where excelling at sport is almost necessary (though far in between experienced phenomenon) it was crucial to do well, which in golf really means – “don’t make a fool of yourself”. The fact that the tournament was in an army run golf course and where “being a fool is as good as being dead” wasn’t making things any easier.

We “teed off” at 7.00am and my worst fears came true when we were asked to play the back 9 first. Those 9 holes that we seldom play in the normal course of our golf game. The first or the 10th, as it was in our case, was played out safely and so was the 11th. The 12th was a disaster and it was only later that I came to view it more kindly (the 13th made titanic seem like bad luck). The 14th was only marginally better before 15th took me right back to the point where I began to ponder if I should just give up the sport all together. Between all this my partners (remember golf is played in groups of 4) continued to try their best to make me look better than my scores did. Their scores were frequently running into double figures and we were running the risk of our 9 hole score looking like what people mostly have after 18. By then the sun and turned out in full and it was beginning to get warm which does well for your body when its into its 37th summer. Then came the 16th, 17th and 18th holes and changed things for me miraculously. I played the 3 holes very well and went in to the breakfast break feeling confident and almost looking forward to the resumption of play for the front 9.

The front 9 started with a beautiful drive on the 1st and just when I thought things had turned around, I messed up the glorious start with a much below par green game which brought back memories of the back 9 start. Another good start on the 2nd saw me get a par and I backed that up with a good show on the 3rd and 4th holes as well. The 5th was another par and the 6th one too was a good show. The 7th was another one over and after playing out a decent 8th, I played another par on the 9th and the last hole of the round. So eventually I turned out a more than decent front 9 performance which lent some credibility to my overall card for the day.

We beat a hasty retreat from the course thinking that we would certainly be among the bottom finishers. However, it was only on the next day that I found out that I had indeed scored well and finished in the top 5 and the icing on the cake was when I found that I had actually won the prize for hitting the highest number of pars for the day. It was a delightful bit of news and I was very proud of my golfing skills. I guess I might still be able to make it in golf…..”Sr PGA…here I come”

MAC HEADS are in a state of existential angst now that the world plus dog has an iPod or an iPhone, according to the Washington Post.

The Post visited an Apple Store and discovered that the feeling that you were somehow ‘thought different’ because you bought Apple gear has faded.

The Post said that the “demi-privacy”, “the clubby feeling” of Apple stores has gone and the place is too damn popular with ordinary people.

The hack, who apparently loves Apple and all who sail in her, bemoans the fact that once upon a time only losers used to scuttle around the shop.

They felt a sense of security that despite the fact that they lived in their mother’s basement, and couldn’t get a girlfriend, at least they had a re-assuringly expensive Jobs’ Mob approved bit of gear and that made them ” special” just like their mum assured them they were really.

Damn those TV commercials. The arrogant Mac guy has ‘friends’, well at least people who wander into his universe and play with his sacred toys.

There is still an element of the gross fantasy of the Apple fanboy out there, but it is being swamped by people who just buy a product and chuck it when it is no longer fashionable. There are even people who dare to complain when their Apple product does not work.

The Apple fanboy who penned this piece of toilet for the Post, said, without a shred of irony, that “Apple shoppers are more than people, more than customers. They are seekers”.

Ordinary people in Apple stores are to that particular writer, like money changers in the temple.

Like most Apple fanboys however he fails to notice that the store has people complaining about their toys. That people are returning to the store with the same faulty piece of gear.

While he complains that the ‘drab PC World’ is still in the real world, there is a lack of spiritual satisfaction he gets from visiting his Apple shrine. The smug satisfaction of ‘thinking different’ like the rest of the fanboys has disappeared.

Apple has become an ordinary electronic company, and Apple geeks are still alone in their mum’s basement without a girlfriend.

Here is a little story someone emailed me recently…

God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage. If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it.
‘Good friends are like stars………You don’t always see them, but you know they are always there.’ “

Scott Eells for The New York Times

The Essar mill in Hazira, which is quintupling steel production, has its own port to bring in iron ore and its own large gas-fired power plant for electricity.
Among villages with thatch-roofed huts and dirt roads on the outskirts of this city in central India, John Deere and LG Electronics have recently built factories turning out tractors and color television sets for sale in India and for export to the United States.

In Hazira, in northwestern India, where some residents still rely on camels to carry traders’ goods, the Essar Group is making steel to be used for ventilation shafts in Philadelphia, high-rise structural beams in Chicago and car engine mountings in Detroit.

For decades, India followed a route to economic development strikingly different from that of countries like Japan, South Korea or China. While its Asian rivals placed their bets on manufacturing and exports, India focused on its domestic economy and grew more slowly with an emphasis on services.

But all that is starting to change.

India’s annual growth in manufacturing output, at 9 percent and accelerating, is close to catching growth in services, at 10 percent. Exports of manufactured goods to the United States are now rising faster in percentage terms than China’s, although from a much smaller base. More than two-thirds of foreign investment in the last year has gone into manufacturing in India, not services.

“Saying we are a back office and China is a factory is a backhanded compliment,” said Kamal Nath, India’s minister of commerce and industry. “It’s not really correct.”

Indeed, in interviews at 18 Indian factories and other businesses in 10 cities and villages scattered across the length and breadth of the nation, the picture that emerges is of a country being driven by advances in manufacturing to a much brisker pace of economic growth.

A prime reason India is now developing into the world’s next big industrial power is that a number of global manufacturers are already looking ahead to a serious demographic squeeze facing China. Because of China’s “one child” policy, family sizes have been shrinking there since the 1980’s, so fewer young people will be available soon for factory labor.

India is not expected to pass China in total population until 2030. But India will have more young workers aged 20 to 24 by 2013; the International Labor Organization predicts that by 2020, India will have 116 million workers in this age bracket to China’s 94 million.

India’s young population will also make it a huge and growing market for years to come, while the engineering skills and English skills of its educated elite will make it competitive across a wide range of industries. So even though India remains a difficult place to do business, several multinationals have been placing big bets on India in hopes of taking advantage of this shifting global dynamic.

General Motors and Motorola are preparing to build plants in western and southern India. Posco of South Korea and Mittal Steel of the Netherlands have each announced plans to erect giant steel mills in eastern India, where Reliance of India will soon construct one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants.

They are finding India’s labor force well suited to their goals. When LG set out in 2005 to fill 458 assembly line jobs at its factory here at a starting wage of $90 a month, it required that each applicant have at least 15 years of education — usually high school plus technical college.

Seeking a young work force, the company decided that no more than 1 percent of the workers could have had any prior work experience. Despite the limitation, 55,000 young people met its criteria for interviews.

“In the villages there is little income,” said Siddu Matheapattu, 24, in between applying sealant to refrigerator frames. “Here I can earn more.”

By contrast, cities in the export-oriented Guangdong Province in southeastern China raised monthly minimum wages this summer by 18 percent, to $70 to $100 a month, after factories reported that they had one million more jobs than workers to fill them. Factories elsewhere in China face less severe labor shortages, but they also are being forced to raise wages.

As India has deregulated its economy, output has gradually accelerated to a growth rate of 8 percent a year, feeding a national euphoria and a few hopes of someday even beating China’s annual growth of more than 10 percent.

Plenty of obstacles remain, however, notably India’s weak infrastructure. China invests $7 on roads, ports, electricity and other backbones of a modern economy for every dollar spent by India — and it shows. Ports here are struggling to handle rising exports, blackouts are frequent and dirt roads are common even in Bangalore, the center of the country’s sophisticated computer programming industry.

The Whirlpool factory in Pune produces up to 33,000 refrigerators a month.

Pervasive corruption has slowed many efforts to fix these problems. India’s labor laws, little changed since they were enacted just after independence in 1947, also continue to discourage companies from hiring workers, by making it very difficult to lay off employees even if a company’s fortunes sour or the economy slows.

Still, a new optimism prevails in India, bordering at times on euphoria.

“The Chinese are very good at copying things, but Indians believe in quality work, we believe in meeting pollution norms,” said S. S. Pathania, the assistant general manager of the Hero Honda motorcycle factory in Gurgaon, 30 miles south of New Delhi. “I think India will pass China very soon.”

Sprawling across more than a square mile next to a gray tidal estuary, the scale of the Essar Group’s complex in Hazira is already impressive. Essar has its own port to bring in iron ore and its own large gas-fired power plant for electricity. At the steel mill, giant buckets pour 150 tons of molten metal at a time to form slabs 2 yards wide and up to 10 yards long.

But the complex is just starting to grow. Essar is quintupling steel production and pushing forward a sevenfold increase in power generation, most of it for sale to a national grid desperately short of electricity.

Growth on that scale, especially in industries like steel and power but also in areas like car parts and household appliances, is what India has long lacked. Industrial production accounts for only a fifth of India’s economic output, compared with two-fifths of China’s. But this ratio is starting to rise in India as manufacturing, led by exports, grows faster than agriculture and even some service industries.

Until recently, legislation effectively barred companies with more than 100 employees from competing in many industries. The laws were intended to protect tiny businesses in villages, often employing women and minorities; high tariffs were placed on imports as well.

But a result was hundreds of thousands of businesses too small to be competitive; India lags behind even the impoverished Bangladesh next door in exports of garments, a big creator of jobs for China. The Indian government has responded by narrowing the list of protected industries to 326 categories of goods from 20,000 and has lowered tariffs.

Comparing factories in India to their competitors in China, many of the Indian factories are smaller but some appear more efficient.

India’s stronger financial system demands higher interest rates than China’s state-owned banks, making it costlier to hold the small mountains of components awaiting assembly that are often seen in Chinese factories. The Confederation of Indian Industry, a national trade group, has also been highly successful in pushing companies to adopt the latest Japanese lean manufacturing techniques.

The drawback is that the nation’s manufacturing boom, built on higher-quality goods made under more modern conditions than in China, is not likely to create as many factory jobs as India needs.

The Essar steel mill, for example, has been replacing old, labor-intensive equipment with more modern gear. “We were having it all done manually, but because the customers demand very high quality, we have to do it automatically,” yelled Rajesh Pandita, an Essar manager, over the roar of a house-size machine that was stretching a minivan-size coil of steel back and forth through large rollers until it was little thicker than plastic kitchen wrap.

The Whirlpool factory in Pune uses machines, not people, to fold the steel exteriors of refrigerators. It has some of the highest productivity per worker of any Whirlpool factory in the world, with just 208 line workers producing up to 33,000 refrigerators a month.

Labor laws, however, discourage flexibility. They still ban companies from allowing manufacturing workers to put in more than 54 hours of overtime in a three-month period even if the workers want to earn extra money. Firing workers is extremely difficult.

“Companies think twice, 10 times before they hire new people,” said Sunil Kant Munjal, the chairman of the Hero Group, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of inexpensive motorcycles.

Hero in Gurgaon, on the southern outskirts of New Delhi, and its archrival, the Lifan Group in Chongqing, a city in western China, produce comparable motorcycles but the similarity ends there. Hero markets heavily to its domestic market, protected from foreign competition by high import tariffs, while Lifan emphasizes exports.

An Industrial Base of Its Own With scant ventilation, Lifan’s factories are filled with diesel exhaust as workers test engines and ride finished bikes at breakneck speed out the doors, zigzagging past co-workers. Hero’s factory in Gurgaon, where Honda holds a minority stake, has far better safety standards and excellent ventilation.

The Lifan factory pays less than $100 a month. The heavily unionized Hero factory pays $150 a month plus bonuses of up to $370 a month; nearly half the workers earn the top bonus, Mr. Pathania said.

Lifan’s labor force is quiescent — would-be organizers of independent labor unions face long jail terms or worse in China. Hero’s workers staged a successful nonviolent protest in 2005 to call for more contract workers to be eligible for the bonuses as well.

Bad Roads and Blackouts Take a Toll on Efficiency

But the biggest question mark hanging over the rise of manufacturing in India lies in whether the country has enough roads, ports and electricity-generating plants to move huge quantities of goods and power the factories that make them.

Captain Abhay Srivastava, an operations manager at India’s busiest port, was on duty on a recent afternoon when a phone call suddenly came in from the docks below. An enormous container ship from Qatar needed to slide 35 feet backward along the privately managed dock at the Nhava Sheva port near Mumbai to allow another large vessel to squeeze into the dock in front of it.

Captain Srivastava grabbed his white hard hat and dashed for the elevator. As soon as he reached the water’s edge, a dozen laborers in orange jumpsuits began straining to arrange a cat’s cradle of heavy, five-inch-thick ropes that would allow the ship to use its powerful winches to pull itself out of the way.

“They are efficient people; they don’t speak a lot,” said Captain Srivastava, who has visited most of the world’s major ports either as a ship captain or for port training exercises. “You go to some places and they just stand around.”

The efficiency of the Nhava Sheva port — it approaches West Coast ports in the United States in the number of containers moved per hour — shows that India is capable of producing world-class facilities.

But big as it is, Nhava Sheva is too small to handle the crush of traffic. John Deere tractors wait in a container at the dock for one to four days before being loaded on a ship.

“If this pace of growth continues, we will see more congestion at the port,” said Raj Kalathur, the managing director and chief executive of Deere’s operations in India.

Similar worries prevail in Chennai, formerly Madras. “Another four or five years, we’ll be choked,” said M. Rafeeque Ahmed, the chairman of the Farida Group, a 9,000-employee shoe manufacturer in Chennai that needs the port for exports.

Infrastructure improvements are particularly important because manufacturing companies are buying more and more components from far-flung suppliers. Making sure all those parts arrive on time requires a reliable transportation system.

“Manufacturing is no longer done all under one roof,” said Victor Fung, the chairman of the Li & Fung Group, a large Hong Kong-based company that buys goods from factories across Asia for sale to retailers and wholesalers in the United States and Europe.

Indian officials are talking about expansion. Planning is under way for new wharves at Nhava Sheva, but the years-long task of construction has not yet started.

China has faced capacity problems, too. A surge in steel production in early 2004 overwhelmed bulk cargo ports. Inflation quintupled in a year, to 5.3 percent, as bottlenecks at ports, highways, railroads and elsewhere in China drove up companies’ costs.

The Chinese response was swift and decisive. The pace of port investment nearly tripled in six months. Work crews labored around the clock to erect more cranes and expand wharves.

The Chinese economy grew at a breathtaking pace of 11.3 percent in the second quarter of 2006, but consumer prices were just 1 percent higher in July than a year earlier.

By contrast, India is struggling with 8 percent inflation this summer as bottlenecks have appeared after three years of 8 percent growth.

Belatedly, India’s roads and ports are improving. Just four years ago, Sona Koyo Steering Systems, an auto parts manufacturer, incurred hefty financing costs to keep a month’s inventory on hand in case deliveries were delayed. Now its factory in Gurgaon makes six deliveries a day to a nearby Maruti car assembly plant; the eight-mile drive takes an hour or more because of traffic jams, but the deliveries get through.

“I’m not going to deny infrastructure is bad,” said Surinder Kapur, Sona’s chairman and managing director. “But a lot of our vendors are around us, a lot of our customers are close to us.”

India is also starting to address chronic power shortages. But it is still a serious problem in northern India, where Mr. Kapur has his steering systems factory. He receives electricity from the national grid just seven or eight hours a day. So the factory has three enormous diesel generators, one bigger than a typical Manhattan living room, operating at four times what an industrial user in the United States usually pays.

Despite such obstacles, India’s manufacturing sector appears poised for further growth. In a country where the national symbol has shifted from government bureaucrats at aging desks to call center operators in cubicles, it looks as if the next icon will be the laptop-toting engineer on a factory floor.

“The old philosophy was, ‘I should work in an office, come in at 10 and leave at 4,’ ” said Nitin Kulkarni, 35, an engineer at the Hazira steel mill. But in recent years, he added, “there has been a revolution.”

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

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

Thank you all very much.

At a fund-raising dinner for a school that serves learning disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question:

“When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot
Understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?” The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. “I believe that when a child like Shay, physically and mentally handicapped comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes, in the way other people treat that child.” Then he told the following story: Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, “Do you think they’ll let me play?” Shay’s father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps. Shay’s father approached one of the boys on the field and asked if Shay could play, not expecting much! The boy looked around for guidance and a few boys nodded approval, why not? So he took matters into his own hands and said, “We’re losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.” Shay struggled over to the team’s bench put on a team shirt with a broad smile and his father had a small tear in his eye and warmth in his heart.

The boys saw the father’s joy at his son being accepted. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay’s team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father wave! d to him from the stands. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat. At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible ’cause Shay didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball. However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing the other team putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, moved
in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least be able to make contact.

The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher. The game would now be over, but the pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the head of the first baseman, out of reach of all team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, “Shay, run to first! Run to first!” Never in his life had Shay ever ran that far but made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled. Everyone yelled, “Run >to second, run to second!” Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to second base. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball, the smallest guy on their team, who had a chance to be the hero for his team for the first time. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher’s intentions and he too intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman’s head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.

All were screaming, “Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay” Shay reached third base, the opposing shortstop ran to help him and turned him in the direction of third base, and shouted, “Run to third! Shay, to third” As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams and those watching were on their feet were screaming, Shay, run home!”

Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the “grand slam” and won the game for his team.

That day,” said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world.” Shay didn’t make it to another summer and died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making his father so happy and coming home and seeing his mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

A wise man once said “every society is judged by how it treats it’s least fortunate amongst them”.