Steve Jobs have courage to follow your heart & intuition

[Dennis Ng]

it's a sad day. The visionary who brought to us Apple, Mac, Ipod, Iphone, Ipad has passed away on 5 Oct 2011...his legacy lives on in our hearts...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... under-dies

I hope we can continue to learn and live an inspired life like Steve Jobs did.

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

I emailed to remembersteve@apple.com the following:

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

It's not how long we live, it is how we live our lives, it's what we do while we are here. What's life about? To develop to our utmost potential, to serve the world while we can, and hopefully, to leave the world a better place than we found it. Steve Jobs, you've done it and inspired us through your life and actions.

The best way for the world to remember and honour you is to live our lives applying your principles and vigor.

Thanks for making the world fall in love with technology, once again. For making technology, so human. My next phone is an Apple. Can't imagine holding anything else.

Dennis Ng, Singapore


Full Text of Steve Job's speech at Stanford University:
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

Be inspired by Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford University: 3 of his life stories he shared: Connecting the dots; about Love and Loss; About Death. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, 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.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

[sereneloong]

I was saddened by the loss, and moved by the speech. I would just like to share with everyone another inspiring speech - this time by J.K. Rowling.

P.S. To me, the passing of Steve Jobs is less about death than it is about life, and the power of any one person who wants to make a difference. You are infinitely more powerful than you think you are. I ask myself: What will I bring to the world today?

----------------------------------------------

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.


I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.

To see the video, click here http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/06/the- ... magination

[Dennis Ng]

I was saddened by the loss, and moved by the speech. I would just like to share with everyone another inspiring speech - this time by J.K. Rowling.

P.S. To me, the passing of Steve Jobs is less about death than it is about life, and the power of any one person who wants to make a difference. You are infinitely more powerful than you think you are. I ask myself: What will I bring to the world today?

Most people struggle to survive becos they only focus on surviving.

It might surprise or even shock you that your life will start to soar when you stop thinking about yourself and family but instead Focus on serving more people and focus on increasing your value add to society.

Live a life of Purpose, a life of Meaning and Contribution, don't just survive.

We have too little time on earth to waste it on merely surviving.

Live each day as if it was your last, for someday it will certainly be.

Cheers!

Dennis Ng

[walkinepark]

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

R.I.P. Steve.

[danielcheng]

With Steve Jobs passing, i decided to revisit this Youtube clip i've viewed some time back during his Stanford School Commencement Address in 2005.

He told 3 Inspirational Stories which was very profound & impactful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Update:
(Oops, realise Dennis also provided the link on top. Anyway, enjoy the speech)

[Battleship]

Re-sharing this post.

http://www.masteryourfinance.com/forum/ ... php?t=2285

[Ms Tan]

This is to share with those who have not seen the young Steve Jobs. He has changed the world with his passion & fighting spirit against the giants with introduction of first Apple product in 1983 - 1984, before he was kicked out of the company he started in 1985:

1983 Apple Keynote-The "1984" Ad Introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSiQA6KKyJo

Steve Jobs demos Apple Macintosh, 1984: ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0FtgZNOD44


His vision of having just ONE button on the phone and the user guide has to be so simple that even Primary One student could understand, was being thrown out as not realistic, but he made it. Thank you SJ for letting us know gadget can be simple & beautiful. I'm proud to be in the generation that can witness the life of an amazing innovator of our time.

[Dennis Ng]

thanks seminar graduate battleship for sharing this.

In a few years from now, your kids and grandkids will ask you what it was like to be alive when Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple (AAPL). They will say: “Jobs was the best CEO in business. What was he like? What did you learn from him?”

It’s human nature to overlook the importance of the here and now. Those who are great and live among us seem more normal because they’re breathing the same air that we are.

But, make no mistake, once Steve Jobs is no longer with us, there will be an outpouring of emotion. The tributes will be endless. And there will be collective regret that we weren’t more awake, paying attention, while he was with us.

The wisdom he shared with us at every major speech, or on an earnings call, or in a casual chat put up on YouTube will seem 10 times wiser because he’s no longer with us.

So, let’s pause today and try to remind ourselves of some lessons Steve Jobs has taught us all — if we’ve been willing to pay attention:

1. The most enduring innovations marry art and science – Steve has always pointed out that the biggest difference between Apple and all the other computer (and post-PC) companies through history is that Apple always tried to marry art and science. Jobs pointed out the original team working on the Mac had backgrounds in anthropology, art, history, and poetry. That’s always been important in making Apple’s products stand out. It’s the difference between the iPad and every other tablet computer that came before it or since. It is the look and feel of a product. It is its soul. But it is such a difficult thing for computer scientists or engineers to see that importance, so any company must have a leader that sees that importance.

2. To create the future, you can’t do it through focus groups – There is a school of thought in management theory that — if you’re in the consumer-facing space building products and services — you’ve got to listen to your customer. Steve Jobs was one of the first businessmen to say that was a waste of time. The customers today don’t always know what they want, especially if it’s something they’ve never seen, heard, or touched before. When it became clear that Apple would come out with a tablet, many were skeptical. When people heard the name (iPad), it was a joke in the Twitter-sphere for a day. But when people held one, and used it, it became a ‘must have.’ They didn’t know how they’d previously lived without one. It became the fastest growing Apple product in its history. Jobs (and the Apple team) trusted himself more than others. Picasso and great artists have done that for centuries. Jobs was the first in business.

3. Never fear failure – Jobs was fired by the successor he picked. It was one of the most public embarrassments of the last 30 years in business. Yet, he didn’t become a venture capitalist never to be heard from again. He didn’t start a production company and do a lot of lunches. He picked himself up and got back to work following his passion. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he only had a few weeks to live. As Samuel Johnson said, there’s nothing like your impending death to focus the mind. From Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech:

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 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.

4. You can’t connect the dots forward – only backward – This is another gem from the 2005 Stanford speech. The idea behind the concept is that, as much as we try to plan our lives ahead in advance, there’s always something that’s completely unpredictable about life. What seems like bitter anguish and defeat in the moment — getting dumped by a girlfriend, not getting that job at McKinsey, “wasting” 4 years of your life on a start-up that didn’t pan out as you wanted — can turn out to sow the seeds of your unimaginable success years from now. You can’t be too attached to how you think your life is supposed to work out and instead trust that all the dots will be connected in the future. This is all part of the plan.

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.

5. Listen to that voice in the back of your head that tells you if you’re on the right track or not – Most of us don’t hear a voice inside our heads. We’ve simply decided that we’re going to work in finance or be a doctor because that’s what our parents told us we should do or because we wanted to make a lot of money. When we consciously or unconsciously make that decision, we snuff out that little voice in our head. From then on, most of us put it on automatic pilot. We mail it in. You have met these people. They’re nice people. But they’re not changing the world. Jobs has always been a restless soul. A man in a hurry. A man with a plan. His plan isn’t for everyone. It was his plan. He wanted to build computers. Some people have a voice that tells them to fight for democracy. Some have one that tells them to become an expert in miniature spoons. When Jobs first saw an example of a Graphical User Interface — a GUI — he knew this was the future of computing and that he had to create it. That became the Macintosh. Whatever your voice is telling you, you would be smart to listen to it. Even if it tells you to quit your job, or move to China, or leave your partner.

6. Expect a lot from yourself and others – We have heard stories of Steve Jobs yelling or dressing down staff. He’s a control freak, we’ve heard – a perfectionist. The bottom line is that he is in touch with his passion and that little voice in the back of his head. He gives a damn. He wants the best from himself and everyone who works for him. If they don’t give a damn, he doesn’t want them around. And yet — he keeps attracting amazing talent around him. Why? Because talent gives a damn too. There’s a saying: if you’re a “B” player, you’ll hire “C” players below you because you don’t want them to look smarter than you. If you’re an “A” player, you’ll hire “A+” players below you, because you want the best result.

7. Don’t care about being right. Care about succeeding – Jobs used this line in an interview after he was fired by Apple. If you have to steal others’ great ideas to make yours better, do it. You can’t be married to your vision of how a product is going to work out, such that you forget about current reality. When the Apple III came out, it was hot and warped its motherboard even though Jobs had insisted it would be quiet and sleek. If Jobs had stuck with Lisa, Apple would have never developed the Mac.

8. Find the most talented people to surround yourself with – There is a misconception that Apple is Steve Jobs. Everyone else in the company is a faceless minion working to please the all-seeing and all-knowing Jobs. In reality, Jobs has surrounded himself with talent: Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Peter Oppenheimer, Tim Cook, the former head of stores Ron Johnson. These are all super-talented people who don’t get the credit they deserve. The fact that Apple’s stock price has been so strong since Jobs left as CEO is a credit to the strength of the team. Jobs has hired bad managerial talent before. John Sculley ended up firing Jobs and — according to Jobs — almost killing the company. Give credit to Jobs for learning from this mistake and realizing that he can’t do anything without great talent around him.

9. Stay hungry, stay foolish - Again from the end of Jobs’ memorable Stanford speech:

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.

10. Anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a sense of vision – Although he’s the greatest CEO ever and the father of the modern computer, at the end of the day, Steve Jobs is just a guy. He’s a husband, a father, a friend — like you and me. We can be just as special as he is — if we learn his lessons and start applying them in our lives. When Jobs returned to Apple in the 1990s, it was was weeks away from bankruptcy. It’s now the biggest company in the world. Anything’s possible in life if you continue to follow the simple lessons laid out above.

May you change the world.

[yhendra]

Hi,

For sharing.

Image done by Adam Sicinski https://www.facebook.com/adamsicinski

[positive7]

The three stories are amazing especially the 3rd. I definitely have learned. Steve Definitely live his life to the fullest. I definitely agree, if we do everything with passion we will never feel tired.

[plim2]

Hello,

Just sharing what we can learn from Steve Jobs.
Source: http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/What-W ... 4.html?x=0

Millions of people today are paying their tributes to Steve Jobs, arguably one of the most important and influential CEOs of modern day history. It is hard to find a person like Jobs. He had laser-like focus and demanded the utmost quality of his employees. From starting Apple in his garage, to getting ousted in 1985 from the very company he built, to coming back in 1997 and taking Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL - News) from the brink of bankruptcy to the largest company in the world, Steve has changed the world in more ways than one. Steve Jobs clearly had a significant impact on people around the world and left us along with the business community a few lessons we can all share.


1) Focus on Quality, Not Money
To Jobs, it was never about the money. At age 22 he had nothing; at age 23 his net worth was $1 million; at age 24, $10 million; and at the age of 25, over $100 million. Along the way, he was uncomfortable with his fortune. His focus was on creating life-improving products and making an impact on a person's life. That's what drove him, that's what made him get up in the morning. Money was just a side effect that he didn't care to think about.

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful - that's what matters to me," said Jobs.

The business community can take note. Put people first. Focus on quality.

2) Focus on the Future, Not the Present or Even the Past.
Always the visionary, Jobs was ahead of his time, time and time again. Too often companies can get trapped in the present, pumping out products with no inspiration. A few examples: In 1998 the first iMac came with no floppy disk drive whereas every other computer manufacturer had still included them at that time. The release of the iPhone did not have a keyboard whereas the Blackberry, the most popular smartphone at the time, had one. It also did not include flash as Jobs saw HTML 5 as the future. Now with the iPad, it promises to be the computer for everyone that the original Mac aspired to be. Through all of these decisions and more there was backlash, but in the end people eventually came around and benefited from this forward thinking. The world would be more innovative if more companies had the same focus.

3) Show People What They Want, Not What They Ask For
Never relying on focus groups, Jobs trusted one thing: himself.

"Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice," he said.

People often think they want something until they get shown an alternative they never thought possible. Another quality about Steve was his ability to say no, even more often than he said yes to ideas.

"The secret to innovation is saying no to 1,000 things," said Jobs.

Of course, no product was his idea alone, but he was the one that fostered the environment for ideas to be created and had the final say. The problem with focus groups is they can be influenced depending on the type of question asked, and the people involved have a preconceived notion of what they want based on the products that are out at the time. The business community should focus more on what they want, and focus on the future and less on the here and now.

4) The Bottom Line
There is no doubt the world has lost an amazing human being. A part of him will live on with the products we use and he will continue to be an inspiration to future leaders. No other CEO in recent memory has had rock stars and politicians show up at his door. Meanwhile, millions of people found out about his death on the very devices he helped create. The business community and future leaders should take note of his example: focus on quality, focus on the future and rely on your internal vision. The world will be a better place for it.

"The thing that drives me and my colleagues … is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence," said Jobs.

In short, a couple of take-aways:
- Move away from "Me first" attitude.
- Don't chase money. Still remember what Dennis told us about his Malaysian millionaire friend experience: "When money comes, it comes so fast, that one wonders where the money has been hiding all these while. Money now is like waterfall, hua la, hua la..."
- Focus on forward thinking. Just like driving, looking at rear view mirror doesn't help us to determine how the road in front is going to be like.
- Be independent in decision-making. No no to herd mentality.

Good day.

[Dennis Ng]

I read this posting by seminar graduate Alvin Chow at his website (blog) www.BigFatPurse.com

http://www.bigfatpurse.com/2011/10/what ... the-world/

Hi Alvin,

yes, I think I shared with you about the importance of having a Passion and Mission in life when we met for the first time in Dec 2008.

For me, I only found my purpose in life in 1998, at age 29. ie.to learn how to master my own finances and reach Financial Freedom and then to teach and help others to reach Financial Freedom as well.

Now i realise my Mission goes beyond just helping others reach Financial Freedom, I want to help to inspire and motivate others to pursue their dreams and passion. I want to help to bridge the Rich-Poor Divide that exist in the world today.

yes, we would definitely Make money and get Richer by increasing our Financial Knowledge.

I hope seminar graduates NOT only Make Money, but more importantly, become a Better Person, strive for Continuous and Never-Ending Improvement, so that we can Serve More People, Increase our Value Add to Society and Make a Difference to the Society.

We can also help the society to change from being Selfish and focus on Self Love to being Selfless and focus on Selfless Love, by first changing ourselves.

I want to initiate to set up a S$100 million Charitable Foundation in Singapore in 5 years' time and set up S$100 million Charitable Foundation in 100 countries in 10 years' time.

This is not my Charitable Foundation, but each foundation is set up by 10,000 founding members.

The Charitable Foundation is aimed to elevate the Poor from Poverty. Poverty is a problem that even governments throughout the world cannot solve. We will elevate the Poor by empowering them with knowledge, how to plan and manage their finances, and to start small business eg. selling things on internet, or become self-employed. Then lend them S$5,000 to S$10,000 (micro-financing) to help them get started...the foundation is supported by 10,000 founding members as volunteers.

I believe it can be done, in 5 years, 10,000 of us each donate S$10,000 to set up the S$100 million Charitable Foundation. We will fine tune the system, then we will send 100 of our founding members to 100 countries to help these countries start a similar foundation in their own country.

Steps to Success is as simple as Conceive, Believe, Achieve...

I firmly believe that this Goal can be achieved if I gather enough people to work towards this goal. And I have counted you as one of the 10,000 Founding Members of this Charitable Foundation. Do you want to be one of the 10,000 people who Make a Difference to Singapore and the World?

I believe that we can do something we Enjoy, Make Money and Make a Difference, ALL at the same time. We can have it all, we can really have it all. What a feeling, what a feeling!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItPbGvPKHFI

In time to come, let's help to set up 100 S$100 million Charitable Foundation in 100 countries to help educate and empower the Poor to elevate themselves from Poverty.

Don't just Make Money, Make a Difference!

Over the years, I realised my greatest Wish is not just to help 1 million people achieve one million dollars...but really to:

1. inspire and encourage more people to find your Mission and Passion in life and to Pursue Your Passion.

2. Be the best you can be in your area of Chosen Field, so that you can Contribute the most to Society

3. Wealth and Riches and Financial Freedom will definitely come if you are really good at what you do and if you learn how to Grow your Money (savings).

4. When you become Wealthy, then it is time for you to think about what you can do for the less fortunate and the poorest in the Society...I believe the best thing we can do for them is giving time and money and also to Inspire them, Empower them, so that they can lift themselves out of Poverty, with our guidance.

5. If in 5 years, 10,000 of us (seminar graduates) can reach out to help/inspire/encourage 100 people each, then together, we can help 1 million people.

Can you see this?
Do you believe this can happen?
Do you want to help to make this happen?
It just take 10,000 of us to do this, starting with the current 1,700 semnar graduates, and that includes you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItPbGvPKHFI

First, when there's nothing but a slow glowing dream
That your fear seems to hide deep inside your mind
All alone I have cried silent tears full of pride
In a world made of steel, made of stone

Well I hear the music, close my eyes, feel the rhythm
Wrap around, take a hold of my heart

[Chorus:]
What a feeling, bein's believin'
I can't have it all, now I'm dancin' for my life
Take your passion, and make it happen
Pictures come alive, you can dance right through your life

[Solo]

Now I hear the music, close my eyes, I am rhythm
In a flash it takes hold of my heart

[chorus (with ... "now I'm dancing through my life")]

What a feeling

What a feeling (I am music now), bein's believin' (I am rhythm now)
Pictures come alive, you can dance right through your life

What a feeling (I can really have it all)
What a feeling (Pictures come alive when I call)
I can have it all (I can really have it all)
Have it all (Pictures come alive when I call)
(call, call, call, call, what a feeling) I can have it all
(Bein's believin') bein's believin'

(Take your passion, make it happen) make it happen
(What a feeling) what a feeling...

[Dennis Ng]

三人行，必有我师焉
择其善而习之
其不善着而改之

when 3 persons walk together, we definitely can find someone to learn from

this is a saying in Chinese.

What does it mean?

If there are 3 of us, we can definitely learn from the other 2 persons.

If we find any of them have any good points, we can try to learn these good points from them.

If we find any of them have any weaknesses, bad habits or any bad points, it can be a very useful reminder for us to review whether we have the same bad points. If we have, please stop such bad points immediately. Or if we don't have, alert ourselves NOT to make the same mistakes as them.

In recent weeks, I shared about what we can learn from Steve Jobs and Jack Ma. Yet, at facebook, some of my facebook friends will point out to me that these 2 individuals have their own bad points as well.

These people are MISSING the POINT.

The point is NOT that I imply they are perfect people, they are NOT. No one is perfect.

The point is we try to learn good points from them, that's all. And we can avoid any bad points they might have.

If you go on life learning by focusing on doing this, you'll become a better person.

Similarly, Dennis Ng is NOT perfect and has many weaknesses. But if just becos I'm not perfect and you decide to ignore some of these things I want to share with you, then the only person who would lose out is yourself, and nobody else.

I'm learning everyday and reminding and focusing on CANI everyday. Continuous and Never-Ending Improvement.