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最黑暗的一周過去了，有種劫後餘生、大難不死的爽快，雖然仍心有餘悸，也蠻慶幸自己還是活了下來，走過留下了怎樣的足跡？也沒時間回過頭看，還是得拼老命地繼續向前衝。
上一周除了解決了管理課的presentation這個心頭大患外，另一項大工程我忘了附加在我悲慘一周的列表中，我要當一個team discussion的leader。那是我修了一門叫做Cross-Culture Discussion的會話課，我們這組有6人，利用每週四中午午餐時間聚在一起，針對一個主題各自發表意見，小組成員每個人都要輪流當一個討論的leader，除了要準備文章設定討論的問題之外，也要在一個小時之內擔任主持人，我們這組剛好是亞洲人，日、韓、港、台，有三位工作經驗相當豐富都是主管級的韓國人。
在場還有一位語文中心的女教授(或至少是副教授)在場，她並不參予我們的討論，但是在旁觀察並紀錄討論主持人的優缺點，並給予建議看要保持或改善哪些方面，有點像是日後我們要主持會議的練習。其實對我來講並不算太難，若是要主持跟美國人的討論，因為語言的劣勢可能會比較吃力，但覺得跟亞洲人交談的話我就覺得游刃有餘了。
上周輪到我，因為真的沒時間在去找新的文章，於是欽點之前讀過得一篇文章來上陣。這篇其實不是文章，而是蘋果的CEO Steve Jobs在史丹福大學的畢業典禮上所發表演講的演講稿。相當引人入勝。但為了顧慮大家課業的繁重我又刪減的更短了，去頭去尾只剩下中間第二個故事，第一個故事大概說他求學時的經過，他並沒有大學畢業，但卻在學校修了一些對他將來的事業發展有非常關鍵影響力的課。第三個故事是他曾經跟死神擦身而過，也因此讓他更體會到怎樣的事情在他生命中才是真正重要可貴的，我把原文放在最後面，有興趣的朋友自己看囉，蠻精彩的喔，我想我擇期再把其中精彩的雋永佳句試著翻譯跟大家分享，因為真的好。
第二個故事的內容大概是說Steve創辦Apple的簡略經過，並且提及他曾經被他創辦的Apple給fired過(奇聞吧!! )，在他失意又氣餒的幾個月中，幸好他仍然愛他的事業而且還有熱情而能夠東山再起從新回到Apple，並一舉當上CEO，他說起這段回億時說，被Apple fired是他這輩子發生過最棒的事情。他便鼓勵年輕學子別被一時的不如意給擊倒，並且要去尋找自己生命中所熱愛的事物，直到你找到的那一天為止。
有鑒於過去的討論題目有點嚴肅，戰爭呀和平呀辦公室健康管理呀，我決定來點比較軟性較人性化的，我希望能夠由個人的生活經驗分享來讓大家更認識彼此，於是我拋出了第二個及第三個兩個問題，分別是：
Q2：挫折不一定是壞事，請跟我們分享你生活經驗中一件讓妳覺得挫折的事情？你又從這件事情學到怎樣的教訓？
Q3：你像Steve Jobs一樣已經找到了你生命中所熱愛的事物嗎？不管是工作上、興趣、或是任何可以讓妳眼睛發亮的事情都歡迎跟大家分享。
其實這有些私人，我本來擔心同學會不好意思開口，所以先擺了第一個不是跟我主題相干的問題Q1當做暖身題，我問：以消費者的觀點來看，你對Apple這品牌以及他的產品的印象如何？
果然不出所料，大家對於要講自己內心事會比較有點害羞，所以有點保留或是挑點比較不打緊的事說，其中有一位韓國爸爸竟然說他從小到大都沒有遇到怎樣的挫折事，真是給他昏倒。其實同學講歸講，我旁邊一直聽，然後也邊做筆記記下我從同學中的回答產生的疑問，再繼續深入追問(不是隱私啦)，我的目的除了引導同學再多說一點，也讓他們的發言內容更加完整。
我覺得我好像變成訪談節目的主持人喔(我想變成真情指數裏的蔡康永)，既要溫情又要得體也不能亂問，還要適時地引導發言者繼續多講一點，同時也要適當地分配每位同學發言的時間。
一小時幾個同學輪流講其實時間過得很快地，結束之後，我們的指導老師都會給我們評量給予建議或是讚美家講啥的，我星期五其實就已經收到了，一來沒時間看，二來想說如果看到不好的評語我心情不好所以逃避著不大想看，星期天晚上讀書讀累讀煩了，心一橫打開來看，哇，佳評如潮，有點出乎意料之外的好，不由得心花怒放(老師的評語我還是炫耀一下地放在最後好了 : P)。
上星期達陣兩次(Presentation加上這個)其實有高興了一下子，但很快地就恢復理智跟平靜了，大概覺得原本在台灣時這兩件對我而言就不是太難的事，雖然換成英文，但只要準備一下還是能應付得宜，有成就感的空間不是太大，我想真正征服的其實是課業以及跟美國人的互動，要再給自己多點壓力也要多加點動力才行，這一陣子我一直思考要怎樣讓自己的語文能力有更大的進展，說跟溝通不是問題，但要說得對、說得巧、說得適宜，將來才能跟美國人競爭。
我參加了學校辦的語文交換的program，我星期三(11/9)考完經濟期中考後就要跟我的女搭檔進行第一次接觸，我平常心以待啦。這program也是我要加強語文的一個方法，對方也是華大的學生，她想學中文加強中文，我們就互相教學，看各自想怎樣加強我們再進行討論，各取所需，我給予蠻高的期望，希望真能讓自己的語文能力能更上一層樓。
[附錄] Steve Jobs的演講稿
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am fine now.
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's 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's 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 others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
[老師的講評]
IBUS 572 – Discussion Leader Evaluation
Kevin Liu – 11/03/05 – What Is Your Passion?
Article and Discussion Questions
This was a very interesting topic and a nice change from our usual discussion topic. It was a good chance to talk to each other on a more personal level. Though people may have felt a little shy about sharing their personal feelings in the beginning, I think in the end everyone was willing to share. Unfortunately, we didn’t have more time to discuss.
The article was a good way to introduce the topic and I liked the last two questions. I may have left off the first question and kept the discussion strictly about people’s frustrations and passions. It seemed a little confusing to me to first talk about Apple products and then talk about individual’s lives. Only focusing on the one topic would have given us more time to complete the discussion. I realize that there wasn’t time for you to share your own frustrations and passions as well.
Your introduction to the discussion was good and you gave us a clear idea of what you hoped to accomplish in your discussion. This is a very important part to any discussion.
Discussion Leader Skills
You showed good discussion leader skills. You are very good listener and were sure to clarify when you had questions about what people were saying. Clarification is a very important part of a successful discussion. You also followed up with additional questions to help the person explain more fully or to add to what they were saying. Through asking additional questions, the discussion remained lively and had a good pace.
You also introduced new ideas in addition to the main questions to help generate additional discussion. I think this was easy for you to do because you really do listen to people and try to understand what they are saying.
We did run out of time towards the end, so you want to watch the time closely so that no one feels rushed and also to give time for yourself to give your own ideas. We did get started a little late which didn’t help with the time.
I thought you did a good job of making sure that everyone participated equally and had a chance to contribute.
All in all you did a good job. My only suggestions would be to watch your time more carefully and keep your topic focused on one main idea.
上一周除了解決了管理課的presentation這個心頭大患外，另一項大工程我忘了附加在我悲慘一周的列表中，我要當一個team discussion的leader。那是我修了一門叫做Cross-Culture Discussion的會話課，我們這組有6人，利用每週四中午午餐時間聚在一起，針對一個主題各自發表意見，小組成員每個人都要輪流當一個討論的leader，除了要準備文章設定討論的問題之外，也要在一個小時之內擔任主持人，我們這組剛好是亞洲人，日、韓、港、台，有三位工作經驗相當豐富都是主管級的韓國人。
在場還有一位語文中心的女教授(或至少是副教授)在場，她並不參予我們的討論，但是在旁觀察並紀錄討論主持人的優缺點，並給予建議看要保持或改善哪些方面，有點像是日後我們要主持會議的練習。其實對我來講並不算太難，若是要主持跟美國人的討論，因為語言的劣勢可能會比較吃力，但覺得跟亞洲人交談的話我就覺得游刃有餘了。
上周輪到我，因為真的沒時間在去找新的文章，於是欽點之前讀過得一篇文章來上陣。這篇其實不是文章，而是蘋果的CEO Steve Jobs在史丹福大學的畢業典禮上所發表演講的演講稿。相當引人入勝。但為了顧慮大家課業的繁重我又刪減的更短了，去頭去尾只剩下中間第二個故事，第一個故事大概說他求學時的經過，他並沒有大學畢業，但卻在學校修了一些對他將來的事業發展有非常關鍵影響力的課。第三個故事是他曾經跟死神擦身而過，也因此讓他更體會到怎樣的事情在他生命中才是真正重要可貴的，我把原文放在最後面，有興趣的朋友自己看囉，蠻精彩的喔，我想我擇期再把其中精彩的雋永佳句試著翻譯跟大家分享，因為真的好。
第二個故事的內容大概是說Steve創辦Apple的簡略經過，並且提及他曾經被他創辦的Apple給fired過(奇聞吧!! )，在他失意又氣餒的幾個月中，幸好他仍然愛他的事業而且還有熱情而能夠東山再起從新回到Apple，並一舉當上CEO，他說起這段回億時說，被Apple fired是他這輩子發生過最棒的事情。他便鼓勵年輕學子別被一時的不如意給擊倒，並且要去尋找自己生命中所熱愛的事物，直到你找到的那一天為止。
有鑒於過去的討論題目有點嚴肅，戰爭呀和平呀辦公室健康管理呀，我決定來點比較軟性較人性化的，我希望能夠由個人的生活經驗分享來讓大家更認識彼此，於是我拋出了第二個及第三個兩個問題，分別是：
Q2：挫折不一定是壞事，請跟我們分享你生活經驗中一件讓妳覺得挫折的事情？你又從這件事情學到怎樣的教訓？
Q3：你像Steve Jobs一樣已經找到了你生命中所熱愛的事物嗎？不管是工作上、興趣、或是任何可以讓妳眼睛發亮的事情都歡迎跟大家分享。
其實這有些私人，我本來擔心同學會不好意思開口，所以先擺了第一個不是跟我主題相干的問題Q1當做暖身題，我問：以消費者的觀點來看，你對Apple這品牌以及他的產品的印象如何？
果然不出所料，大家對於要講自己內心事會比較有點害羞，所以有點保留或是挑點比較不打緊的事說，其中有一位韓國爸爸竟然說他從小到大都沒有遇到怎樣的挫折事，真是給他昏倒。其實同學講歸講，我旁邊一直聽，然後也邊做筆記記下我從同學中的回答產生的疑問，再繼續深入追問(不是隱私啦)，我的目的除了引導同學再多說一點，也讓他們的發言內容更加完整。
我覺得我好像變成訪談節目的主持人喔(我想變成真情指數裏的蔡康永)，既要溫情又要得體也不能亂問，還要適時地引導發言者繼續多講一點，同時也要適當地分配每位同學發言的時間。
一小時幾個同學輪流講其實時間過得很快地，結束之後，我們的指導老師都會給我們評量給予建議或是讚美家講啥的，我星期五其實就已經收到了，一來沒時間看，二來想說如果看到不好的評語我心情不好所以逃避著不大想看，星期天晚上讀書讀累讀煩了，心一橫打開來看，哇，佳評如潮，有點出乎意料之外的好，不由得心花怒放(老師的評語我還是炫耀一下地放在最後好了 : P)。
上星期達陣兩次(Presentation加上這個)其實有高興了一下子，但很快地就恢復理智跟平靜了，大概覺得原本在台灣時這兩件對我而言就不是太難的事，雖然換成英文，但只要準備一下還是能應付得宜，有成就感的空間不是太大，我想真正征服的其實是課業以及跟美國人的互動，要再給自己多點壓力也要多加點動力才行，這一陣子我一直思考要怎樣讓自己的語文能力有更大的進展，說跟溝通不是問題，但要說得對、說得巧、說得適宜，將來才能跟美國人競爭。
我參加了學校辦的語文交換的program，我星期三(11/9)考完經濟期中考後就要跟我的女搭檔進行第一次接觸，我平常心以待啦。這program也是我要加強語文的一個方法，對方也是華大的學生，她想學中文加強中文，我們就互相教學，看各自想怎樣加強我們再進行討論，各取所需，我給予蠻高的期望，希望真能讓自己的語文能力能更上一層樓。
[附錄] Steve Jobs的演講稿
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am fine now.
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's 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's 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 others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
[老師的講評]
IBUS 572 – Discussion Leader Evaluation
Kevin Liu – 11/03/05 – What Is Your Passion?
Article and Discussion Questions
This was a very interesting topic and a nice change from our usual discussion topic. It was a good chance to talk to each other on a more personal level. Though people may have felt a little shy about sharing their personal feelings in the beginning, I think in the end everyone was willing to share. Unfortunately, we didn’t have more time to discuss.
The article was a good way to introduce the topic and I liked the last two questions. I may have left off the first question and kept the discussion strictly about people’s frustrations and passions. It seemed a little confusing to me to first talk about Apple products and then talk about individual’s lives. Only focusing on the one topic would have given us more time to complete the discussion. I realize that there wasn’t time for you to share your own frustrations and passions as well.
Your introduction to the discussion was good and you gave us a clear idea of what you hoped to accomplish in your discussion. This is a very important part to any discussion.
Discussion Leader Skills
You showed good discussion leader skills. You are very good listener and were sure to clarify when you had questions about what people were saying. Clarification is a very important part of a successful discussion. You also followed up with additional questions to help the person explain more fully or to add to what they were saying. Through asking additional questions, the discussion remained lively and had a good pace.
You also introduced new ideas in addition to the main questions to help generate additional discussion. I think this was easy for you to do because you really do listen to people and try to understand what they are saying.
We did run out of time towards the end, so you want to watch the time closely so that no one feels rushed and also to give time for yourself to give your own ideas. We did get started a little late which didn’t help with the time.
I thought you did a good job of making sure that everyone participated equally and had a chance to contribute.
All in all you did a good job. My only suggestions would be to watch your time more carefully and keep your topic focused on one main idea.
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