I retired on Jul 1, 2009 at the age of 55. I wrote this blog to help current retirees and new ones on how to retire well. This is based on my experience and readings. I welcome feedback and comments.
Regards, Richard
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on November 30, 2011
When someone does something at the critical time for you, you can rest assured that you will remember that event forever. Being grateful is a feeling of appreciation for someone who helped us along the way.
I recently came across a beautiful video on this subject. Have look.. It will definitely worth your while. I am leaving this for my readers and my future generations..
This is about changing lives..
Posted in Health, Personal Development, Retirement | 5 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on November 11, 2011
How true…
And then it is Winter….
You know. . . time has a way of moving quickly
and catching you unaware of the passing years.
It seems just yesterday that I was young,
just married and embarking on my new life with my mate.
And yet in a way, it seems like eons ago,
and I wonder where all the years went.
I know that I lived them all…
And I have glimpses of how it was back then and of all my hopes and dreams…
But, here it is… the winter of my life and it catches me by surprise…
How did I get here so fast?
Where did the years go and where did my youth go?
I remember well…
seeing older people through the years and thinking that those older people
were years away from me and that winter was so far off
that I could not fathom it or imagine fully what it would be like…
But, here it is…
my friends are retired and getting grey…
they move slower and I see an older person now.
Some are in better and some in worse shape than me…
but, I see the great change…
Not like the ones that I remember who were young and vibrant…
but, like me, their age is beginning to show and we are now those older folks
that we used to see and never thought we’d be.
Each day now, I find that just getting a shower is a real target for the day!
And taking a nap is not a treat anymore… it’s mandatory!
Cause if I don’t on my own free will… I just fall asleep where I sit!
And so…
now I enter into this new season of my life unprepared
for all the aches and pains and the loss of strength and ability
to go and do things that I wish I had done but never did!!
But, at least I know, that though the winter has come, and I’m not sure how long it will last…
this I know, that when it’s over… its over…
Yes, I have regrets. There are things I wish I hadn’t done…
things I should have done, but indeed, there are many things I’m happy to have done.
It’s all in a lifetime…
So, if you’re not in your winter yet…
let me remind you, that it will be here faster than you think.
So, whatever you would like to accomplish in your life please do it quickly!
Don’t put things off too long!!
Life goes by quickly. So, do what you can today,
as you can never be sure whether this is your winter or not!
You have no promise that you will see all the seasons of your life… so,
live for today and say all the things that you want your loved ones to remember…
and hope that they appreciate and love you for all the things
that you have done for them in all the years past!!
Spend as much time as you can with loved ones, for Winter may never come again.
”Life is a gift to you.
The way you live your life is your gift to those who come after.
Make it a fantastic one.”
Posted in Health, Medical, Personal Development, Personal Finance, Retirement, Retirement Nest, Travels | 26 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on October 23, 2011
Here is the concluding part of Steve Jobs at Stanford by Gary North… A great article…Absolutely must read..Thank Steve Jobs for his life and accomplishment. Thank Gary for a great writeup of Steve’s life lesson and sharing his perspective with us.
REV. JOBS BRINGS HIS SERMON TO A CLOSE
I have already covered two-thirds of Steve Jobs’ 2005
commencement address to graduating students at Stanford. He
adopted the powerful technique of telling stories from his
life — stories from which he extracted fundamental
principles of ethics and action. He used those personal
stories as launching pads for conclusions relevant to his
listeners’ lives. This is not easy for a speaker to do, but
when he does this well, it is highly effective. It can even
change a few listeners’ lives.
The first story was on his dropping out of Reed
College. Message: you cannot connect the dots of your life
in advance, but you can in retrospect.
http://bit.ly/JobsDots
Assumption: there is an overall coherence in life that we
cannot see day by day. The second was on being fired from
Apple in 1985, then re-hired in 1997. The message: don’t
settle in life. Don’t compromise with your basic beliefs.
Never quit.
We now come to his third story. “My third story is
about death.” This is a good theme to end the story of any
life.
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.
This is good advice. It is not easy advice to take. It
is not an easy plan to implement. Why not? Because it deals
with that final event in a lifetime with which everyone
must settle. Most people prefer to avoid considering
it on a regular basis. Not so with Jobs.
THE MOST IMPORTANT TOOL
Jobs was a master of digital tools. But digital tools
were not his crucial tool, as he explained.
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.
This much is true. It is profoundly true. “Naked thou
came into this world, and naked thou shalt depart.” Or,
more authoritatively, “For we brought nothing into this
world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out” (I
Timothy 6:7).
Question: “How much did he leave behind?”
Answer: “All of it!”
He said that this realization was “the most important
tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices
in life.” This is an important admission. When one of the
world’s richest men, who earned his money the hard way –
serving customers for three decades — says that one thing
was the crucial tool in his success, it is wise for his
listeners to pay attention.
What is truly important? Not the following: “all
external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment
or failure.” But we must be careful in accepting at face
value a rhetorically charged litany of anything in a
speaker’s presentation. Even if the list is accurate, it
may not really illustrate the point he is making.
THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE
I don’t believe this part: that he regarded as
peripheral all expectations. He was intensely
future-oriented. This fact was the bedrock foundation of
conclusion #2: “Don’t settle.” Why should anyone adopt this
principle? Only because he thinks there are negative
consequences for not honoring it. That is, he has
expectations. He believes that causes and effects are
linked. This deeply religious faith was the underlying
principle of his first story about connecting life’s dots.
He believed that something greater than what we see here
and now governs the connecting of life’s dots.
People are purpose-driven to one degree or another. We
act. We decide. We have expectations about the results of
our actions. Ludwig von Mises made this the foundation of
his economic theory. As actors, we have external
expectations. We think that the world will be a slightly
different place — a better place, at least for us — after
we take a course of action.
Steve Jobs was one of those rare individuals whose
decisions changed the external world. He was invited to
speak at Stanford because of this.
Conclusion: external expectations are an inescapable
concept. It is never a question of external expectations
vs. no external expectations. It is always a question of
which external expectations.
On the other hand, these three ought to be peripheral
in our decision-making: “all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure.” Obviously, this is not easy.
Jobs seemed to be governed by pride, but maybe not. He was
surely governed with supreme self-confidence. If not, he
could not have adopted and then implemented this principle:
“Don’t settle.” This was why he could overcome his fear of
embarrassment or failure.
Jobs was a genius in the broadest sense. He was in the
same league as Thomas Edison: a major creator in several
fields. He was a skilled technician. He was also an artist.
His mastery of form and function rivaled that of Raymond
Lowey, who was never widely known, but who was a Jobs-like
industrial designer. His success at Pixar indicates how
incomparably versatile he was. But all of it would have
come to naught before he even began had he been burdened
with the fear of embarrassment or the fear of failure. This
triumph over these two common human emotions marks the
great entrepreneurs.
Edison made this remark famous: “Genius is 1%
inspiration and 99% perspiration.” It was an exaggeration
but clever. It has stood the test of time. Yet that intense
perspiration will not be expended apart from the internal
triumph over the fear of embarrassment and the fear of
failure. This means that the successful person must escape
the limits of the normal human comfort zone. The comfort
zone is, in my view, a far greater barrier than the
constraints of financial capital. It is easier to raise
money than it is to overcome the fear of failure and the
fear of embarrassment. If you do not achieve the second,
you will not achieve the first.
Jobs was making a point. “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.” We are back to Kris Kristofferson’s lyric:
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
That, too, is a profound insight.
WEALTH AND RESPONSIBILITY
The more you accumulate, the more you have to lose.
This is a constraint on freedom of action. Wealth increases
some choices — the choices based on money — but it
imposes others: the choices based on responsibility. There
is no escape from responsibility in a free society. You
must act economically on behalf of some future customers
and disregard the expectations of all the others. You must
allocate your money and your time. Whatever you spend on
one project you cannot spend on another.
Did you ever have to make up your mind;
Pick up on one and leave the other behind?
It’s not often easy and not often kind.
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Jobs was saying that the fear of losing whatever you
possess must not constrain you in your pursuit of some
vision, some connecting of the dots. He had a lot to lose.
He learned that when he got fired. He rebounded. He went
out in 1985 as a very rich man. But he went out a failure
and embarrassed, as he told his audience. He had to put
that behind him. The next time around — after 1997 — he
was even more unwilling to settle.
Yet we all must settle. In most of our lives, we must
settle. We should refuse to settle in those key areas that
he designated as “truly important.”
This is where most people prefer not to venture:
identifying what is truly important in their lives, and
thereby also identifying where they must refuse to settle
in the connecting of their lives’ dots. Yet we must, he
said.
STORY #3
He then began Story #3.
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.
From the day we are born, the Great Physician tells us
to get our affairs in order. Every religion tells us this.
But, because the termination date is not given to us, we
procrastinate.
Then one day, Jobs received something like a
termination date.
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.
There are skeptics who say that Jobs was using that
speech to persuade investors that Apple was a good company
to invest in. He was free of cancer. That motivation was
possible, but the nature of the message of Story #3 would
seem to preclude this. So was the message of Story #2:
“Don’t settle.” Story #3 was about settling.
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.
This was the central message of his speech. It could
have been inserted into any graduation speech over the last
century. But, because Jobs had gone through the valley of
the shadow of death, his words had more impact.
Rhetorically, this was the heart of the speech. He had
emotionally faced death. He had come face to face with
“life’s change agent.”
As a speaker, he was gifted. He fused the central
message of his speech with its central rhetorical flourish.
In his previous two stories, he matched lesser messages and
lesser rhetorical flourishes. The stakes were not so high.
Here, he went for what salesmen call the close. Here, he
called his listeners to action.
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.
THE NEED FOR DOGMA
If taken literally, this is silly: “Don’t be trapped
by dogma — which is living with the results of other
people’s thinking.” A commencement address is more laced
with dogma than most sermons. A commencement speech is a
sermon. It is more a sermon than almost any other form of
speech. Funeral sermons are rhetorically subdued, due to
the nature of the event. Graduation speeches are rites of
passage for the future leaders of society in the West. They
are where leaders do their best to persuade their listeners
of something. Job’s commencement address is the supreme
model of the genre.
In short, dogma is an inescapable concept. It is never
a question of dogma vs. no dogma. It is always a question
of which dogma. And whose.
“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.” I
agree. But we are now back to message #1 from Story #1: the
underlying coherence, relevance, and lifetime power of
whatever connects the dots. He invoked providence, but it
is the providence of each person’s inner voice.
What connects the dots? How does the inner voice –
not Son of Sam’s inner voice, I trust — recognize the
underlying pattern of the dots and then communicate this
information to us? What is intuition? Why should we trust
it? Jobs was serving as Rev. Jobs that day. But Rev. Jobs
never made the transition from rhetoric — emotional appeal
– to logic: a causal explanation for the connection of the
dots.
THE CALL TO ACTION
Then he offered an example.
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-1970′s, 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.
CONCLUSION
Here ended the lesson.
It was a masterful sermon. As an occasional writer for
The Whole Earth Catalog and the Whole Earth Epilog, I
appreciate his reference. The foolishness reference
attracts me. As the apostle Paul wrote, long before the
Whole Earth Catalog, “For ye see your calling, brethren,
how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the
foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God
hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the
things which are mighty” (I Corinthians 1:26-27).
Jobs is dead. He did not get those extra decades. He
got an extra six years. He put those years to productive
uses. Customers benefited greatly. His final gadget, the
iPhone4s, sold more units in the first three days than any
new product in the history of manufacturing: almost four
million units. He did not live to see this. The phone was
announced on October 4. He died on October 5.
So, what was his sermon’s message? He laid this out
masterfully: (1) the dots are connected in a providential
way, somehow; (2) don’t settle, at least not in the areas
that matter; (3) the inescapable reality of death is
supposed to help us identify what is sufficiently important
so as not to settle. This all adds up to high-order
foolishness, he said. Be foolish.
Like the child who asks, “But who created God?” I
would have asked Jobs: “But what connects the dots?” He
never said. I don’t know if he ever spent much time
searching for an answer to the question. But his life was
surely an astounding series of connected dots.
As another commencement speaker said, “Go and do thou
likewise.” But get the dots question answered.
Posted in Health, Medical, Personal Development, Personal Finance, Retirement, Retirement Nest, Travels | 80 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on October 20, 2011
Continuing the saga… Part II… again from Gary North’s Reality Check..
STEVE JOBS AT STANFORD
Part 2: Setback and Recovery
In Story #2 in his 2005 commencement speech at
Stanford, Jobs talked about the shock at being fired as CEO
of Apple in 1985. He had co-founded the company. He had
taken it from a garage enterprise to a major producer. Then
he got sacked by his board.
In his speech, he neglected to identify the #1 source
of Apple’s success: VisiCalc. That was the first “killer
app.” The phrase came as a result of VisiCalc’s success.
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet.
APPLE’S WINDFALL
It was developed by Dan Bricklin. He was a student at
the Harvard Business School. Wikipedia provides the basic
story.
Conceived by Dan Bricklin, refined by Bob
Frankston, developed by their company Software
Arts, and distributed by Personal Software in
1979 (later named VisiCorp) for the Apple II
computer, it propelled the Apple from being a
hobbyist’s toy to a useful tool for business.
After the Apple II version, VisiCalc was also
released for the Atari 8-bit family, the
Commodore PET, TRS-80, and the IBM PC.
According to Bricklin, he was watching a
professor at Harvard Business School create a
financial model on a blackboard. When the
professor found an error or wanted to change a
parameter, he had to erase and rewrite a number
of sequential entries in the table. Bricklin
realized that he could replicate the process on a
computer using an “electronic spreadsheet” to
view results of underlying formulae.
Dan Bricklin is forgotten. VisiCalc is forgotten. It
was replaced by a program called 1-2-3, which was in turn
replaced by Microsoft Excel. But, in its day, VisiCalc
gave Apple II the edge over Radio Shack’s TRS-80. It was
the first business software application that was perceived
as crucial. Businessmen bought Apple II computers in order
to use VisiCalc.
That was a far more crucial dot in Steve Jobs’ career
than calligraphy ever was. It was dropped into his lap as a
free bonus. It had nothing to do with Jobs’ aesthetic
sense. It was a series of boxes on a screen into which
people typed numbers.
I call this providential. Jobs preferred to call such
events “your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” He did
not see life as a silver platter, but nonetheless a
platter. “This approach has never let me down, and it has
made all the difference in my life.” Bricklin handed him a
windfall in 1980. He made good use of it.
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.
This is a remarkable story. It is a rags-to-riches
story. It is the stuff of dreams in America as in no other
society in history. It will be told over and over. And he
was correct: it had two parts. The day he was fired ended
part 1.
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.
THE VISIONARY AND THE BEAN-COUNTER
This was the conflict between the visionary and the
bean-counter. This is inescapable. The bean-counter
represents the conflict. They provide the beans. Without
them, the visionary sleeps on the floors of friends. The
beans are the whips by which the real Simon Legrees in life
– customers — flagellate producers who do not perform to
their satisfaction. The lifetime refrain of the customer is
this: “What have you done for me lately?”
The producer can produce no more than what the supply
of beans will allow. He can borrow more beans in terms of a
projected stream of beans. He can cut costs and hoard
beans. But he cannot escape the restraints of beans. There
is no such thing as a free lunch.
The visionary thinks that his product cannot fail to
please customers in the future. The bean-counter says,
“Prove it.” But the visionary cannot prove it. That is why
we call him a visionary.
Jobs in 2005 still regarded the Macintosh as Apple’s
greatest product. That was because it was aesthetically
neat. It was his calligraphy. He failed to mention the ill-
fated Apple III, which could not compete with the PC-AT 286
or the Intel 386 chip that was in Compaqs. Apple was losing
ground where the beans were: businesses. He was still
trying to sell to artists. The bean-counter reminded him:
the phrase “starving artist” reflects reality. The
Macintosh was a poor business computer. Jobs had to go.
If I had been on the board, I would have voted to fire him.
It was the best thing that ever happened to him, he
reflected in his speech. It was also a great thing for
customers.
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 world’s 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.
NeXT set a high standard, but it did not affect the
lives of the masses. Pixar did. The inner calligrapher of
Steve Jobs found an outlet. He pursued both sides of his
brain: the digital precision of NeXT code and the animation
of Pixar. He told stories with digits.
In 1993, I visited a professor of computer science at
Texas A&M. I had walked into his office unannounced on a
Saturday with my son, who was ready for his junior year of
college. He told us this:
The typical user’s manual in the microcomputer
field has on average one error per page. I do not
mean typographical errors. I mean procedural
errors. The only exceptions are the manuals
produced by NeXT. There are no errors.
Jobs was a perfectionist. It took success outside of
Apple to let him exercise his artistic skills alongside his
digital skills. He became the Jedi master of the right-
brain/left-brain synthesis. He got even richer.
Jobs told the audience:
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.
A door had closed. Two more opened across the street.
One of the familiar themes in the book, “The Millionaire
Next Door,” is the rags-riches-rags-greater riches theme.
They often go bankrupt. They recover.
Venture capitalists look for entrepreneurs who have
gone through a bankruptcy. They want to see how a man
recovers. A string of successes does not provide
information on how well the man will perform under
adversity with their money.
He sought counsel. It was high-level counsel.
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.
He rebounded. This was a time of testing. But, in
saying this, I am saying that the testing was personal. The
counselors were personal: very rich, successful men in
Silicon Valley. His rebound was personal.
But what of the test itself? What about the connection
between the chronological dots? Was there anyone
administering the test? Here, he was silent.
He then added: “Don’t lose faith.” He did not
elaborate. The inescapable question is this: “Faith in
what?” He then went into cheerleading mode: “Follow your
dream.”
DON’T SETTLE
He had faith in himself. He wanted his listeners to
have faith in themselves.
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.
He told this to students who were getting their
certification papers at an expensive university, one that
is usually listed in the top ten in the United States. It
is one of about three dozen universities attended by a
third of the world’s richest and most powerful people.
(Read David Rothkopf’s book, “Superclass,” or watch his
videos delivered at Stanford: http://bit.ly/DR20-80)
“Don’t settle.” This is nonsense. It is outrageous
nonsense. Of course you settle. For 80% of your life, you
settle. It is that other 20% where you make your mark. You
devote 80% of your time to putting food on the table. You
devote the other 20% of your work day to that area of your
life that I call the calling: the most important thing you
can do in which you would be most difficult to replace.
If you have faith, and if the object of your faith
delivers the goods, then you can move from 80-20 to 20-80.
You can spend 80% of your time on your calling. This rarely
comes when you are young.
Jobs was a rarity. He found his calling three times:
in delivering a tool that ran VisiCalc, in developing
Pixar, and in developing the iPod/iPad tools that make
other people’s apps — none killer so far — available to
customers. He produced the platforms that made individual
programmers efficient in delivering their goods to
customers.
He spoke as if he were normal. He was not normal. That
was why he was asked to speak.
He spoke as if he had not been the recipient of a
series of opportunities to serve as a middleman in between
others and customers. He delivered the goods that let
others deliver their goods. He got rich and famous by doing
this.
Life is filled with grunt work. Most work is grunt
work. Unless someone promotes the idea of an elite of
producers who hire workers who do all of the grunt work, he
had better learn to do great grunt work. The 80% of life
that is grunt work is what allows the 20% of good work to
be possible, and the 4% of top quality work to change the
world.
Garage work is grunt work. Grunt work is basic to all
work.
The free market lets us sort out our grunt work from
great work. Customers pay for the output of our grunt work,
but demand ever-better work. We decide how to allocate our
work.
Jesus had three years of preaching, beginning around
age 30. The previous 20 years had been mainly grunt work.
He knew his Torah, as we read in Luke 2:41-5. This is the
only reference to the years in between the birth and
ministry of Jesus. He was a carpenter’s apprentice for much
of the time, then a carpenter. Carpentry is grunt work. He
settled. But not forever.
CONCLUSION
Steve Jobs did not live a charmed life. He lived a
representative life of highly successful people. He was
adopted by the right family. He went to the right college.
He dropped out of the right college. He was aided by the
right people. He found the right partner: Wozniak, who was
a technician, not a publicity hound and not a controlling
type. He got fired for the right reason at the right time.
He walked away a multimillionaire. He rebounded.
He followed his dream. He helped change the world by
giving tools to people: producers and consumers. At Pixar,
he became a middleman between story tellers and story
lovers. He lived his life as a middleman.
We all do. Here is the bedrock truth: we are all
middlemen. We buy low and sell high in some market. We find
customers to serve. Some do this better than others. A few
do it magnificently. Jobs was one of the few.
He did not settle in life. But in one area, we all
must settle. That was the theme of Story #3.
Posted in Health, Medical, Personal Development, Personal Finance, Retirement, Retirement Nest, Travels | 85 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on October 16, 2011
Gary North’s Reality Check shared his perspective about Steve Jobs at Stanford in his Issue 1109 dated Oct 14, 2011. I like this writeup and wish to share with my readers… Good entertainment reading that teaches us something about life.. Thank you..
STEVE JOBS AT STANFORD
Part 1: Faith in a Godless Providence
INTRODUCTION
Sometime in 2004, a Stanford University official
compiled a list of potential speakers for the 2005
graduation speech. Every college goes through this
exercise. The ideal candidate has these characteristics:
(1) rich. (2) famous, (3) not a college graduate, (4) a
good speaker, (5) available; (6) cheap.
Why these characteristics? (1) He might give a large
donation. (2) Fame justifies offering the invitation, and
it will impress the alumni, who may give donations. (3) The
speaker may be so impressed with the invitation that he
will accept it. (4) He will not make a fool of himself and
therefore the university. (5) He will show up. (6) Self-
evident.
The official narrowed down the list and sent it up the
chain of command. Steve Jobs’ name was on the list. Someone
high up in the chain persuaded the president of Stanford to
send Jobs an invitation. Entrepreneurially speaking, this
turned out to be one of the greatest decisions in
commencement speech history.
Jobs competently delivered a great speech. It was
arguably the greatest commencement speech ever. It is
surely the most viewed commencement speech ever. The
Stanford University version has had almost 11 million hits
on YouTube. Another version has had over 6 million hits. It
was posted by someone identifying himself — I presume
“himself” — as peestandingup, and this act of posting is
probably the most significant thing that Mr. Up will ever
do.
The video is 15 minutes long, which is just about
right for a commencement address.
Printed out, it is two and a half pages long. Again, this
is just right. You can read it in a few minutes.
http://bit.ly/JobsAtStanfordText
It had three points. These were three very relevant
points, especially for a group of several thousand
graduates of one of the world’s most prestigious and
expensive universities.
His introduction to his speech was flawless on paper.
In delivering it, he had a brief case of the “uhs,” but as
soon as he got rolling, they disappeared. Here is how he
began.
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.
With these words, he followed the standard protocol
for a commencement address. (1) He congratulated them for
having survived the intellectual ordeal of college. (2) He
congratulated their parents for having survived the
financial ordeal of college. (3) He played humble when in
fact he was more accomplished than any of them will ever
be. (4) He offered what every graduating audience wants to
hear: a few brief stories that might possibly be relevant
in their lives.
I begin where he did: with Story #1. He announced:
“The first story is about connecting the dots.”
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.”
He began his career with the same decision that two
other titans of the microcomputer era also made: dropping
out in their first year of college and never going back.
Bill Gates did this. So did Michael Dell.
His story was different. He was an adopted child. His
biological mother had wanted the adopting parents to be
college graduates. His were not. They got her to sign the
papers by promising to send him to college. He chose the
wrong 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.”
He cared about his parents, or so he implies. In any
case, he quit. Had he gone to a community college and then
to a tax-funded, low-tuition university, he might have
graduated. He would have gone on to achieve conventional
things in a better-than-average way. We would never have
heard of him. I say this as a Calvinist who believes in
predestination. He would have agreed with me. His first
story is about providence. He just did not believe in God.
He remained at Reed, taking advantage of a course that
hardly anyone could use: calligraphy.
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.
That some Reed College parents were paying a fortune
to have their children study calligraphy is typical of
higher education, which quietly and unofficially sells
itself as necessary for success in the world and then
indulges its faculty members, who get paid well for
teaching non-practical courses.
Jobs fooled them. He made the course practical. But
not at first. Calligraphy was to prove crucial later on in
his career.
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.
As a speaker, Jobs achieved what few speakers ever
achieve in a major speech. He provided a hook on which the
listeners could hang their hats. This was not just
a key word. It was a key example. It let the audience
have a mental picture to reinforce a verbal argument. This
is very hard for a speaker to do, I assure you. Calligraphy
illustrated a point — the central point in Story 1.
THE POWER OF PROVIDENCE
Here, Jobs came to the crucial issue: the meaning of
life. To understand life, you must connect the dots. By
this he meant the chronological facts that make up a life.
Out of them come relevance. But we can see this relevance
only in retrospect, he told the students emeriti.
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.
But why? Why should the dots have relevance? He took a
seemingly peripheral set of dots — days spent studying
calligraphy — and came up with retrospective meaning.
This retroactive assessment was imputed by Jobs to the
chronological dots. But how relevant was this to the world
at large? Did aesthetically pleasing type fonts really make
a big difference in the coming of the microcomputer era?
Could he prove this? I doubt it. But, in his life,
aesthetics were crucial. He stood almost alone in this
faith. He built Apple in terms of it. He got rich in terms
of it: the fusion of technology with aesthetics.
I contend that type fonts are peripheral to computers
generally. They are not useless, but they are peripheral.
They are icing on the digital cake. I am typing this in
Courier font, which looks more like a typewriter font than
any other font. But I am well aware that aesthetics are not
peripheral to Apple products. That is probably why I do not
use Apple products. I prefer plain old text. I am a text
man. I am a dinosaur with digits. I am typing this on a
1984 PC/AT keyboard. I have eight others just like it.
The computer engineer would say that Jobs liked
calligraphy at age 18 because he was hard wired to
appreciate aesthetics. The software programmer would say he
was programmed. I say he was predestinated.
Jobs was fired by the board at Apple in 1985 because
his aesthetics got ahead of the available low-cost
technology. He was hired back in 1997 when technology had
caught up. It took Apple stock at $5 a share and likely to
head lower to persuade the board to swallow its pride and
put him in charge again. They got rich because they did.
Jobs drew a conclusion in 2005. “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.” For him, God was relegated to “whatever.” That
was epistemologically appropriate for 21-year-olds who were
about to graduate from Stanford. This is the prevailing
epistemology of modern academia: God is “whatever.” He is
not part of the curriculum, except as “whatever.”
God can be trusted as the whatever who resides in
between life’s dots. He shares this undefined and
undefinable kingdom with your gut, destiny, life, and
karma. Problem: none of this is part of any curriculum at
universities that charge $50,000 a year: tuition, room,
board, and textbooks. Gut, destiny, life, karma, and
whatever are extra-curricular activities, even off-campus-
only activities — not in the same league as football
games, keg parties, and that unique buddy system that
modern campuses offer. (http://bit.ly/CollegiateBuddies)
HELPING HANDS ALONG THE WAY
Jobs’ discovery of calligraphy was made possible by
the kindness of others.
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-cent 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.
In following the dots of his days spent as what he
called a drop-in, Jobs became a moocher. That is a
pejorative term. He was a bum. A leech. He was absorbing
free sleeping space, free food at the Hare Krishna temple,
and free information as an auditor at a very expensive
college.
In society, there is charity. Jobs was famous for not
giving charity, yet his career path depended on it.
People let him mooch. They saw that he was not wasting
his time, so they went out of their way to sustain him in
his quest. He followed his dream. But there is no such
thing as a free lunch. Whatever he achieved in life was the
product of other people’s faith in him.
Why would anyone have faith in him? Why didn’t they
say this? “Get a night job, Jobs. Pay your own way.” That
was their prerogative. But they treated him more kindly,
less demandingly. They cut him some slack.
They did what he never did in business relations. They
did what he never did in private, as far as we know. If he
gave away money in private, fine. His right hand did not
know what his left hand was doing. I am willing to admit
that he may have had a generous side. But he never publicly
promoted charitable giving.
He barely perceived in his speech to those eager ex-
students that his life was a gigantic contradiction. His
success in business seemed to be based on words and actions
that would have kept him from connecting the dots in his
drop-in phase of life.
In this sense, Steve Jobs was one of the most morally
blind, highly successful men in history. There have been
self-consciously evil famous men. There have been power-
seekers, wealth-seekers, and sex-seekers. The triumvirate
of money, sex, and power have lured many men to their doom.
But Jobs was different. He pursued the combination of
aesthetics and high technology with a passion.
He connected digits in connecting his life’s dots. But
he never honored the origin of those dots. They came from
something other than his gut (instinct, intuition),
destiny (impersonal), life (common), karma (impersonal).
They came from the kindness of others.
By many accounts, Steve Jobs was a mean, ruthless SOB.
He was the living incarnation of the opposite of those
people who gave him his start in life, beginning with his
parents, who sacrificed for his education.
That was the great tragedy of Steve Jobs. He was
productive as few men ever are. He was driven internally –
by what? — to serve customers well. As a driven man, he
drove others. But at the start of his career were people
who were not driven and who did not drive him. They let him
follow his gut. They let him connect the dots at his
leisure and their expense. Those forgotten people –
unknown to us, but not by God — made possible his success.
Read the testimony again. Look for the central word.
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-cent 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.
The central word is “I.” This was the paradox of Steve
Jobs’ life. It was all “I,” yet to build up his own ego, he
had to serve customers.
——————————————————-
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This is the unspoken, burning shame that could kill Obama’s
presidency…
It could spell the end of his short political career…
It’s all revealed in this extremely urgent and controversial
documentary report.
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——————————————————-
CONCLUSION
The free market made possible his economic success.
The free society made possible his early life as a moocher.
Voluntarism was at the heart of Steve Jobs’ success.
He absorbed others’ charity and returned the favor to
others, not as charity, but as profit-seeking output. This
economic system has made us all rich in the West, by any
standard of pre-1850 comparison. As P. J. O’Rourke put it,
“When you think of the good old days, think dentistry.’”
The free market is a moral system, not because it
makes men moral, but because it rewards those who serve
others efficiently and penalizes those who don’t.
Steve Jobs’ personal characteristics in his
economically productive years did not inspire the
development of those virtues which had made his early years
productive. In another economic system or social order,
Steve Jobs would have made a first-class tyrant. He was far
more Simon Legree than Uncle Tom. But the free market made
him a giant. It let his customers make him rich. It also
encouraged those who were under his verbal lash to keep on
working to meet his standards.
His customers did not pay him to be nice. They paid
him to deliver the goods, which he did. They did not feel
his lash. They plugged and played and enjoyed the fonts.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll buy an iPad3. It had better
allow the use of a PC/AT keyboard.
Posted in Health, Medical, Personal Development, Personal Finance, Retirement, Retirement Nest, Travels | 167 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on October 14, 2011
This is a great story. Those who read this will find peace living for old nagging parents. Hope this story brings understanding and joy to all children who look after their aging parents..
Father, Daughter & a Dog
- story by Catherine Worthmoore
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Watch out! You nearly broad sided that car!” My father yelled at me. “Can’t you do anything right?”
Those words hurt worse than blows. I turned my head toward the elderly man in the seat beside me, daring me to challenge him. A lump rose in my throat as I averted my eyes. I wasn’t prepared for another battle.
“I saw the car, Dad . Please don’t yell at me when I’m driving..”
My voice was measured and steady, sounding far calmer than I really felt.
Dad glared at me, then turned away and settled back. At home I left Dad in front of the television and went outside to collect my thoughts….. dark, heavy clouds hung in the air with a promise of rain. The rumble of distant thunder seemed to echo my inner turmoil. What could I do about him?
Dad had been a lumberjack in Washington and Oregon . He had enjoyed being outdoors and had reveled in pitting his strength against the forces of nature. He had entered grueling lumberjack competitions, and had placed often. The shelves in his house were filled with trophies that attested to his prowess.
The years marched on relentlessly. The first time he couldn’t lift a heavy log, he joked about it; but later that same day I saw him outside alone, straining to lift it. He became irritable whenever anyone teased him about his advancing age, or when he couldn’t do something he had done as a younger man.
Four days after his sixty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack. An ambulance sped him to the hospital while a paramedic administered CPR to keep blood and oxygen flowing.
At the hospital, Dad was rushed into an operating room. He was lucky; he survived. But something inside Dad died. His zest for life was gone. He obstinately refused to follow doctor’s orders. Suggestions and offers of help were turned aside with sarcasm and insults. The number of visitors thinned, then finally stopped altogether. Dad was left alone..
My husband, Dick, and I asked Dad to come live with us on our small farm. We hoped the fresh air and rustic atmosphere would help him adjust.
Within a week after he moved in, I regretted the invitation. It seemed nothing was satisfactory. He criticized everything I did. I became frustrated and moody. Soon I was taking my pent-up anger out on Dick. We began to bicker and argue.
Alarmed, Dick sought out our pastor and explained the situation. The clergyman set up weekly counseling appointments for us. At the close of each session he prayed, asking God to soothe Dad ‘s troubled mind.
But the months wore on and God was silent. Something had to be done and it was up to me to do it.
The next day I sat down with the phone book and methodically called each of the mental health clinics listed in the Yellow Pages. I explained my problem to each of the sympathetic voices that answered in vain.
Just when I was giving up hope, one of the voices suddenly exclaimed, “I just read something that might help you! Let me go get the article..”
I listened as she read. The article described a remarkable study done at a nursing home. All of the patients were under treatment for chronic depression. Yet their attitudes had improved dramatically when they were given responsibility for a dog.
I drove to the animal shelter that afternoon.. After I filled out a questionnaire, a uniformed officer led me to the kennels. The odor of disinfectant stung my nostrils as I moved down the row of pens. Each contained five to seven dogs. Long-haired dogs, curly-haired dogs, black dogs, spotted dogs all jumped up, trying to reach me.
I studied each one but rejected one after the other for various reasons too big, too small, too much hair. As I neared the last pen a dog in the shadows of the far corner struggled to his feet, walked to the front of the run and sat down. It was a pointer, one of the dog world’s aristocrats. But this was a caricature of the breed.
Years had etched his face and muzzle with shades of gray. His hip bones jutted out in lopsided triangles. But it was his eyes that caught and held my attention. Calm and clear, they beheld me unwaveringly.
I pointed to the dog. “Can you tell me about him?” The officer looked, then shook his head in puzzlement. “He’s a funny one. Appeared out of nowhere and sat in front of the gate. We brought him in, figuring someone would be right down to claim him. That was two weeks ago and we’ve heard nothing. His time is up tomorrow.” He gestured helplessly.
As the words sank in I turned to the man in horror.. “You mean you’re going to kill him?”
“Ma’am,” he said gently, “that’s our policy. We don’t have room for every unclaimed dog.”
I looked at the pointer again. The calm brown eyes awaited my decision. “I’ll take him,” I said. I drove home with the dog on the front seat beside me.. When I reached the house I honked the horn twice. I was helping my prize out of the car when Dad shuffled onto the front porch… “Ta-da! Look what I got for you, Dad !” I said excitedly.
Dad looked, then wrinkled his face in disgust. “If I had wanted a dog I would have gotten one. And I would have picked out a better specimen than that bag of bones. Keep it! I don’t want it” Dad waved his arm scornfully and turned back toward the house.
Anger rose inside me. It squeezed together my throat muscles and pounded into my temples. “You’d better get used to him, Dad . He’s staying!”
Dad ignored me.. “Did you hear me, Dad ?” I screamed. At those words Dad whirled angrily, his hands clenched at his sides, his eyes narrowed and blazing with hate. We stood glaring at each other like duelists, when suddenly the pointer pulled free from my grasp. He wobbled toward my dad and sat down in front of him.. Then slowly, carefully, he raised his paw..
Dad ‘s lower jaw trembled as he stared at the uplifted paw Confusion replaced the anger in his eyes. The pointer waited patiently. Then Dad was on his knees hugging the animal.
It was the beginning of a warm and intimate friendship. Dad named the pointer Cheyenne . Together he and Cheyenne explored the community. They spent long hours walking down dusty lanes. They spent reflective moments on the banks of streams, angling for tasty trout. They even started to attend Sunday services together, Dad sitting in a pew and Cheyenne lying quietly at is feet.
Dad and Cheyenne were inseparable throughout the next three years.. Dad ‘s bitterness faded, and he and Cheyenne made many friends. Then late one night I was startled to feel Cheyenne ‘s cold nose burrowing through our bed covers. He had never before come into our bedroom at night.. I woke Dick, put on my robe and ran into my father’s room. Dad lay in his bed, his face serene. But his spirit had left quietly sometime during the night.
Two days later my shock and grief deepened when I discovered Cheyenne lying dead beside Dad ‘s bed. I wrapped his still form in the rag rug he had slept on. As Dick and I buried him near a favorite fishing hole, I silently thanked the dog for the help he had given me in restoring Dad ‘s peace of mind.
The morning of Dad ‘s funeral dawned overcast and dreary. This day looks like the way I feel, I thought, as I walked down the aisle to the pews reserved for family. I was surprised to see the many friends Dad and Cheyenne had made filling the church. The pastor began his eulogy. It was a tribute to both Dad and the dog who had changed his life.
And then the pastor turned to Hebrews 13:2. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
“I’ve often thanked God for sending that angel,” he said.
For me, the past dropped into place, completing a puzzle that I had not seen before: the sympathetic voice that had just read the right article… Cheyenne ‘s unexpected appearance at the animal shelter. . …his calm acceptance and complete devotion to my father. . and the proximity of their deaths. And suddenly I understood. I knew that God had answered my prayers after all.
Life is too short for drama or petty things, so laugh hard, love truly and forgive quickly. Live While You Are Alive. Forgive now those who made you cry. You might not get a second time.
And if you don’t send this to at least 4 people — nobody cares. But do share this with someone. Lost time can never be found.
God answers our prayers in His time……..not ours..
Posted in Uncategorized | 60 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on October 7, 2011
Steve Jobs eloquently described his life experience better than anyone I know. Here he shares what Steve Jobs is in his own words.
You should listen to his speech. I wish everyone I know will also listen this speech..
Listen, learn and live your life your own life..
Here is the full text version of that same speech..
Posted in Personal Development, Retirement | 28 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on October 7, 2011
A tribute to Steve Jobs..
** The cult of Steve Jobs **
The world knew very little about Apple’s co-founder. But the culture he promoted spoke to our deepest desires. < http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/magazine-15194365 >
Listen to what Steve Jobs is all about in The Crazy Ones.
Thank you for making us a part of your wonderful life journey…
Posted in Health, Medical, Personal Development, Personal Finance, Retirement, Retirement Nest, Travels | 57 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on September 28, 2011
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Posted in Uncategorized | 141 Comments »
Posted by Papa Rich Wee on September 14, 2011
We retirees have to be careful with money. I found a website showing how some retirees figured out that living a good life doesn’t necessarily require you to spend a lot of money. Here are the lessons they have learned about living well on less..
Posted in Health, Medical, Personal Development, Personal Finance, Retirement, Retirement Nest, Travels | 13 Comments »
Papa Rich Wee
