Of Darkness, Optimism and Light

I have known a remarkable woman for several years. She is an amazing lady with a keen insight into the inner workings of the universe, and had known a perfect balance between positive thoughts, right focused action. She had pulled me out of disappointment several times with all FAITH.

Did I mention she is the most wonderful woman I have ever met. :-)

Anyway today I have seen her very lost( i use that for a lack of better word).

So here I attempt to remind her own lesson of Faith in my own words.

Guys I think this insight will most definitely help everone too.

Here we go...

Darkness, everyone will go through darkness right. I mean it is the nature of the universe.
Like we have discussed previously that is the core of the life's purpose.
So we need to come out of darkness. Of late this is what I have learnt.

This is the story of a General who was a POW in Vietnam war. He was captured by the enemies and tortured. His fingers cut off, and brutally mutilated. He was tortured by the worst kind.
But he survived remarkably and at the end he was reunited with his beloved wife and now leads a happy life.

When asked how he was able to survive, these were his words.

"I never lost faith in the end of the story. Inever doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect, I would not trade."

Wow. So that is the optimism that made him survive. Right? No Wrong.

Again when asked ok so Who did not make it?

He said, oh the Optimists.

What? The Optimists, I dont understand, you may say. Here is his answer.

"Yes the Optimists, they are the ones who said, We'are going to be out by Christmas, And Christmas would come and go. Then they would say we would be out by Easter.

Easter would come and go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Chrsitmas again.

And they died of broken heart.

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be"


Wow how profound is that?

I am the culprit of this undue optimism without the proper regard for the brutal facts.

I did so because I was in a rush to make a Queen Bee really a queen. But I guess I was wrong. It aint going to be hapening by Christmas.

But it will most certainly, and most definitely happen in the end.

So girl, we will get there. We will change the world. But it is going to take time and effort and lets plough through the course happily.

So long, to a happy, focused effort.

Do you want to know the 5 things to succeed?

Could you tell us five things that entrepreneurs must do to succeed?

• Come up with a compelling idea.
• Have a well thought out execution plan.
• Execute as planned and demonstrate success quickly.
• Be passionate about your idea, articulate it well.
• Build a core team that buys into your idea.

--- Uma Ganesh, Ceo and Principal Consultant, Kalzoom Technologies.

How much would you spend?

Think about this for a second.

Lets say A professor from Stanford university, assembles a team of top notch world class researchers and begin a quest to find out what it is which makes a great success.

They research the data for years on to figure out what are the principal charesterstics of a compoany that actually kill the rest and destine to be the greatest among the rest.

And they finally figure it out after years of research and can tell you precisely what is it that made them great and the precise things that we can do to achieve the same greatness when implemented.

How much would you spend. I would personally spend atleast a few thousand dollars.

Well if you are into building anything, personal success, or a compoany or a business, whatever it is. Get your hands on this research. It only costs 20 bucks.

It is called Good To Great by Jim Collins.

Man it is one of the most insightful, and yet simplistically implementable principles i have ever seen.

Believe me I have been on this quest for about 10 years and have seen most of all the new age and management work.

Fail Forward Fast

I have been thinking about failures and how disapponting they are and their effect on our performance.
For me atleast not only that failure or lost cause causes the disappoitment but it also reminds me of how lonely I am in terms of my quest for wealth. The lack of a loved one to rest a shoulder on will definitely hurt.

With all that said, I want to put the failures in perspective.

When you intend to go from Point A to Point B, or from here whereever you are to a point that you intend or desire to be FAST, there is only one thing that is most inevitable.

I guarantee that it is Failure which by definition would be to taste a different or a less desirable outcome than what we might expect. I mean no matter what field it is, what business, what ever it may be, Failure is inevitable ( for a worthy desire of course).

So with all this inevitability, how can we let this hinder our path to success. How can we lose the valuable energy, time, emotion, quality of life.

So from now on whenever we hit a failure we should really be happy that we are one step closer to the success than what it was before. Makes sense right.

Or better yet lets FAIL FORWARD FAST.

Do, Fail, check the gauge on what went wrong, adjust the rudder, do again, and the cycle goes on until the target is reached.

So DO NOT attach any emotions to failures. Makes sense right.

Hmmmm did we hear it in a religious text called Gita. DETACHMENT.

Keep a non chalant attitude towards the fruit, and ACT with all the focus.

Think Certain Way

I take up a new challenge upon myself.

To take up a new career, a completely different path
than what I have did for the most part of professional
life as a daily laborer. (well anyone who actually
works to make that particular dollar is a laborer in my sense).
That is my personal opinion though. Lets not go there.

So now I am still going to be a daily wage worker but a different one.

I will become a SAP BW consultant. I have no freaking idea about this.

But from now on in one month I will end up in a job. Atleast with an offer
in hand.

Now "Think about Certain Way" come into play .

Let the game begin.

Have an Optimal Day

Somebody I know and respect a lot had said, Have an Optimal Day.
I have never heard anyone say that before. The usual things we hear is
have a wonderful, great, beautiful, blah blah blah day.
But never Optimal day.

When I looked at the meaning of the word it is actually pretty impressive.

Granted that we may not all the time have a great or a wonderful day.
We are all humans and we go through these phases and come across these stubling blocks,
hit failures, miss targets, get hurt by loved ones, or just wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

Damn looks like a lot os shit can happen in life.

Anyway with all these, no matter what our constraints or circumstances or we can have an Optimal day given those constraints. So it is within that spectrum, whatever the best is we can do it optimally and not worry about a bad day as such.

Because pretty soon, even the small inches we gain, can effect the landscape dramtically at the end of game.

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered 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, 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. 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 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.

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"Dumb"ledore - ummm I wonder if Ms. Rowling knew about this.

Anyway, now that I have failed, I have erred, I have not lived upto the expectations, no matter what it is.

This is my biggest strength. To Stay Hungry and to Stay Foolish.

I end my day with this.

I know of no more an encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life through consious endeavor.

Amen.