It certainly is a truism that you never realize, even remotely, how much you rely on technology to live your life until you're forced to do without it for an extended period of time. This is something that I've known to be true, in a kind of a abstract way, all of my life (well, that is, with the occasional iceberg of experience coming to the fore in my otherwise free-of-incident ocean: the 30 hour power outage here in New York a few years back, and so on); but it wasn't until about a month ago that I underwent--shall we put it lightly?--a very grounding experience.
Just after I'd gotten back from the "Healing Your Deepest Wound" workshop, I had a day-long layover in Manhattan before heading down to Orlando to see my mother for the first time in a few years. I'd purposely planned said latter trip to take place immediately after the former, thinking (and rightfully so, as it turned out) that anything I wanted to say, that any past images I wanted to clear (in myself), that, indeed, any healing that I might hope to finally take place whatsoever, if any of this was to ever happen, would, most likely, only happen if I was still riding the energy I'd taken with me from the workshop I'd been through only days previous. And while it's still not for me to say if any healing did in fact take place (though perhaps the process in and of itself has been aired and acknowledged--for me, now, this is probably enough), one of the interesting side effects, of spending that off day here in town meditating on both what I'd just been through (the workshop) and what I was about to go through (finally having it out with my mother) did serve to put me in, understandably, what I can only describe as a very acute state of mind... And in this, for lack of a better phrase, "rather sensitive" state, I had a premonition. And not just any premonition, mind you--anyone who knows me knows I've had a few of these in recent years, with the one caveat being that the vast majority of them, as profound as some may have been, have, at the same time, been almost impossible to DO anything with on this plane of reality--this one new particular "feeling state" was, for the first time, absolutely practical: and I suddenly knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, one very striking, very inevitable thing:
My computer's hard drive was about to fail.
Some news, considering that, between the half dozen or so computers I've owned over the last 15 years of my life, I have, not once, ever had any sort of hardware problem whatsoever that has resulted in any kind of data loss. And with this Powerbook I'd been using for more than two years? Never a single problem of any kind. As a result? Well--
I fear that I just might have fallen into that peculiar bad habit which is so endemic of our digital era: that of not backing things up.
For some--for most, actually, in this day--I'd imagine a data loss would entail the erasure of photos, music (though most of you will have had your music backed up on a portable device), and software (though again, likely backed up, this on the original CDs from whence it came). And perhaps a bit of writing, too, for a lot of you--though the diaries of many are increasingly being held online (witness the content you're reading right now). But for a writer... One who's been working consistently for four years on two scripts and a novel...
The loss, naturally, would be devastating.
I wasn't completely adverse to backing up my data, of course--it was just something that I did once every several months. But it never occurred to me--never, once, ever--that I might actually have to REVERT back to my saved data (from months past) and begin again from said foundation. The thought of it, the very thought, of having to reconstitute months upon months of thinking... It was a damning realization--and one I corrected IMMEDIATELY by reformatting an external firewire drive, disk doctoring it, and pushing absolutely everything I had on over to it--a process that took the better part of 5 or 6 hours (effectively killing this one day off, a day I'd set aside for more important things...). But happen it did, and the relief that followed--knowing that everything actually was, indeed, safe--was tremendous.
My hard drive, for the first time in my life, failed days after I got back from Florida.
I brought my Powerbook to the Apple Store here in Soho (twice, before they were of any help, and on the second visit the prognosis was simply, "Your hard drive has failed", which, obviously I already knew...), and then on over to Tekserve (highly recommended, on 23rd and 7th), who dutifully who recommended that, yes, they could replace the drive--up it, in fact, from 40GB to an even 100--but the work would take at least a week. Possibly longer. (As it happened, it took ten days--and then another week on top of that as it quickly became clear that I had to, yet again, re-install newer versions of the OS and re-register and/or re-pirate most of the software I had on the machine, but regardless, the personal data itself was safe, and thank God for that, and for premonitions in general, but I digress--) And during those few weeks, I would be, for the first time in years, actually on a forced vacation.
Or perhaps "vacation" is probably the wrong word. Perhaps "forced temporary retirement" fits the bill a tad better--but alas, for a writer, when the writing machine has been taken away, it is NOT a relief (though I always imagined it would be, here...); instead, it's more like sitting in the most hellishly dry desert you can fathom, not moving, waiting for water to come, taking it on faith that it will, and yet not knowing when, if ever, it will arrive.
I mentioned this sensation days later to my analyst (a Jungian, and hence we do a lot of dream work, but as this new state was affecting my life a great deal I certainly thought it bore mentioning), who in turn came back with the observation, "Exactly: this is a GROUNDING experience for you..." And, physically, it was: for so many years the various sources of conflict in my life--my demons, all of it--had been internal ones; and now, for the first time, the "wall" was not in me, but rather, it had actually displaced itself outside, into a separate, physical artifact. And there was nothing I could do about it--there would simply be no "flights of mind" for a little while: I was, then, in every sense, "grounded".
One of the side-effects of this phenomenon--so rarely encountered, and yet so crucial, I believe, for all of us--is that, when your creative life stops, and yet, this is all you have (and here, I don't, at this time, pretend to have any real social life to fall back on in circumstances like these), you really are forced to spend a lot of time looking into a kind of metaphysical mirror, cracked and distorted as it may be. And if you look long enough, and the silence goes on long enough, you're going to have to come up with, if not some answers, at least a few questions: questions which, for the longest of time, you just might have, as an intellect (ahem), found very clever ways of avoiding...
First the obvious, standard, metaphysics-of-being ones:
"If I subtract all of the experiences I have had, am having, will ever have, and can imagine having, what is it that is left over, if anything, that constitutes my sense of self?"
"Why have I made the choices that I've made? And did I ever really have any control over my having made them?"
"Am I living the right life?"
And so on. The standard stuff, nothing terribly profound, and clearly nothing all that far from anything that might arise out of a group of suitably inebriated college freshmen.
But here's where it gets interesting--if you extend the time at which your creative life has ground to a halt, and (having no other means of output, nor distraction), thus, as a result, you extend the time you spend in front of your (metaphysical) mirror, you begin to notice something: the questions start to take on an air of--shockingly--PRACTICALITY... Dig a few layers deeper, and you start getting to questions which, when you answer them (and here you'll find that you actually can), usually provide you with A) answers that you don't like and, wonderfully, terribly B) answers that you know you need to change, and can, but haven't.
Purely through a lack of your own volition.
"Why am I surrounded by the people that I am? And why do I feel like I don't have an authentic relationship with any of them? And never have? And never will?"
"Why am I doing what I am doing right now, in life? Why do I keep at it with all the passion and fervor I can muster, all the while knowing that, as happy as I am with the result, I hate the process and feel like it kills me just a little bit every time I go through it?"
"Why have I never truly known the experience of love?"
These are all questions that HAVE ANSWERS. They are easy answers as well, because it's not really so much about the specifics of any of the above given situations, as to what, instead, they all have in common...
Me.
This is grounding.
I have a lot more to say on this, and quite a few more posts to get up in the next few days, but in the interim, considering that I am now, obviously, back online and that my Powerbook is finally up and running in perfect working order, I'll go ahead and, having at least raising the issue, bow out this evening on something of a higher note: this with the commencement address given last month by Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple, the company that makes the machine I am now, once again, writing on) to the graduating class of Stanford University.
More soon.
Steve, take it away...
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.
-- Steve Jobs