Inspirations

I graduated from high school almost 30 years ago, but since I grew up in a home where the word “college” was never mentioned, I assumed college was for other people. The only option I thought I had was to get married.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work out well. By 2003, I found myself going through the most difficult time of my life as my second marriage (of 24 years) was unraveling. I had worked off and on over the years but had dedicated most of that time to full-time parenting.

As I sat in consultation with the attorney discussing my “no-option future,” she told me, “The first thing you need to do is to go to school and get an education.” It was the first time I had ever considered what I needed to do for myself. “I wouldn’t even know how to walk through the front door of a college,” I reasoned. Thank God for the Internet— checking out the college online was a safer approach!

I dared to take the next step; I called and asked questions. Before I knew it, I was taking my first online class, English 101. (Due to my inexperience, this felt like taking three classes instead of one, but the end result was worth it.) Later, I read a blurb about a new adult accelerated program. When I attended the informational meeting, I met lots of people with stories similar to mine. I entered the program and, two years later, I’m finishing up my associate’s degree and planning my nextstep.

It certainly hasn’t been easy: divorcing, becoming a single parent, working andhaving a full-time school load, not to mention training my brain to study and think like it never has before. But failure was not an option. Sure, I still have much work ahead of me, but I now have the confidence to continue; I knowI will complete my bachelor’s degree. (And even at my age, it still feels good to see an “A” on a paper and brag about it to my kids!)

However, I don’tknow how I would have done all this so far without God’s grace, encouragement from family, friends, and fellow classmates, and help from the accelerated program staff. I hope this encourages others, who may not know where to start or who lack the confidence to walk through that college door, to take that first step forward. If I can do it, so can you!

(This story is taken from http://www.parkland.edu/arc/success.htm)

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"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

~Foster C. McClellan

"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

~Maya Angelou

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This is a picture of a sunset on a beach.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

~Mark Twain

"Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world's work, and the power to appreciate life."

~Brigham Young

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in making new landscapes but in seeing existing landscapes with new eyes. "

~Marcel Proust

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined. "
~Henry David Thoreau

This is an enlarged photo of a cluster of several pink flowers.

"We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true."

~Woodrow Wilson

"Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born."
~Dr. Dale E. Turner

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. "
~Eleanor Roosevelt

Inspirational Speech

Subject: Good Stuff from Steve Jobs

(This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs,
CEO of Apple Computerand of Pixar Animation Studios,
delivered on June 12, 2005, at Stanford).

"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. Pixarwent 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."

"Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within you. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key." --Hermann Hesse

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