Papa Rich Wee
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.
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