Steve Jobs’s speech - June 12, 2005 - Stanford University

Steve Jobs’s speech - June 12, 2005 - Stanford University

     “You’ve got to find what you love”

     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 sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

     None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 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 backward 10 years later.

     Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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 4,000 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 world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, 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 1960s, 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

Insects and animals. The top new species of 2016

     Humans have made their way to the moon, landed rovers on Mars and sent spacecraft to the outer reaches of the solar system. But the Earth remains a little-known planet. That becomes clear when naturalists look for creatures closer to home and find unknown gems. Here are our favorite new species of 2016.

     UNKNOWN TUMBLER

     Tumbleweeds are synonymous with the American West. At some point, two of them interbred to form a new species, Salsola ryanii, which is about 5 feet in height and nearly as wide. Usually, such hybrids are sterile, but in this case, the plant underwent an unusual genetic event that led to a duplication of its entire genome. That allowed it to reproduce and also made it incompatible with either of its parents. It has been found at 15 sites throughout California. "It's extremely rare to catch a new species in the act of appearing and expanding," says Norm Ellstrand, a professor of genetics at the University of California, Riverside, "and very exciting."

     HOW MANY PENISES?

     When biologist Jean Krejca unearthed an extremely leggy millipede in a remote cave in California's Sequoia National Park, she knew it was special, so she sent it to the millipede experts Bill Shear and Paul Marek. They determined it was a new species and gave it the name Illacme Tobini. With 414 legs, it's one of Earth's leggiest creatures. It is closely related to Illacme plenipes, which lives about 150 miles away and has 750 legs—the most of any animal. The millipede also has four gonopods, the millipede equivalents of penises, and boasts zoo poison glands.

     A VEGETARIAN PIRANHA

     Piranhas are famous for their fearsome teeth and ability to quickly devour flesh. But not all creatures in this biological family are so brashly carnivorous. Researchers from Brazil's Federal University of Para have discovered a new species of piranha-like fish with chompers specialized for grinding seeds and other vegetable debris that falls into the tributaries of the western Amazon, where it lives. It grows to a length of i8 inches and has reddish coloration, with yellow on its fins and belly, and it is sought after by fishermen for its meat. The biologists named it Myloplus Zorroi, after the fictional character Zorro, a hero in Latin America.

     WHIP SCORPIONS

     Whip spiders, also known as tailless Whip Scorpions, display more variety than scientists knew. Brazilian researchers uncovered eight new species of these animals in the Amazon rain forest of northern Brazil. They aren't true spiders—they lack silk and venom glands—but they do possess fearsome-looking appendages called pedipalps that look like arms with claws and are used to grab prey. These spiny freaks hang out in caves or leaf litter. To tell the species apart, researchers Gustavo Miranda and Alessandro Giupponi counted the hairs on their pedipalps.

     THE LEAF THAT WASN'T

     When is a leaf not a leaf? When it's a spider. Max Kuntner, an arachnologist at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts, and colleagues discovered the creature on a night-time walk through a rain forest in southern China. They placed it in the genus Poltys with orb-weaving spiders that live in China and produce distinctive circular webs. It's the first arachnid known to mimic foliage, a survival strategy that helps it avoid predation by wasps and other insects.

     SNAKE IN THE SUN

     The Bahamas are hardly an unexplored place. It came as quite a shock, then, to herpetologist Graham Reynolds when he found a handsome, undescribed silver serpent on a small uninhabited Bahaman island. Reynolds, who works at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, called it the Conception Bank silver boa (Chilabothrus Argentum), and it's already listed as critically endangered: Reynolds and his colleagues found only 33 of them on the island.

     GLOWFISH

     These fish don't need a light—they carry their own, thanks. In August, scientists reported that they had found two new species of deep sea fish with this unusual arrangement. They have light-producing bacteria in a pouch within their gut that makes them appear to glow. They can change the size of this pouch, contracting it to hide the light and expanding it to reveal the light, which then passes through transparent scales on their underside. The scientists dubbed these new species the gray mirrorbelly and black mirrorbelly—Monacoa Griseus and Monacoa niger.

     PARASITE IN PURPLE

     While most plants rely on the sun for energy and food, some pursue an alternative stratagem: thievery. Japanese scientists have found a bizarre new plant they call Sciaphila yakushimensis (after Yakushima, the lush Japanese island where it was found). This species, like its relatives, makes its way aboveground only when it flowers—in this case with a purple blossom. It gets its sustenance by stealing nutrients from the roots and root-bound fungi of other plants.

     JOHNNY'S FAVORITE CRAWLER

     How many kinds of tarantulas exist in the United States? Until evolutionary biologist Chris Hamilton investigated, nobody knew. He and his colleagues spent nearly a decade looking for tarantulas and sorting through contradictory past studies. The team turned up 14 new tarantula species, mostly in the Southwest. An all-black species found near California's Folsom Prison—where Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, recorded a live album—was dubbed Aphonopelma johnnycashi.

     TEENY-TINY PEACOCKS

     Australian biologist Jurgen Otto has spent the past decade cataloguing Peacock Spiders, the males of which engage in adorably strange jigs to woo females, extending their furry legs and flashy abdomens. He's discovered dozens of new varieties, and in May, he co-authored a paper in the journal Peckhamia identifying seven more. The spiders range in length from 0.1 to 0.2 inches, and they are often brightly and brilliantly colored. 

     Source: Newsweek, 6.01.2017 – 13.01.2017, by Douglas Main, pp. 52–53.  

The age of technology

The age in which we live is an age of extraordinary scientific and technological progress. It is the age of space flights, of television, of nuclear power, of clever chemistry, of automation and computers, of the transplant of living organs, of sensational discoveries in biology and medicine.

It is an age of wonders.

The trouble is that too many benign conquests also have their negative sides. Inventions and discoveries that open up new worlds of peace and power also open up new worlds of war and destruction. The creation of new terrible arms, the tragedy of pollution, which is gradually destroying so many forms of life on our planet, are but a few examples of man’s offenses against the world we live in. 

Source: Colle – Meloni, News. For Juniors, Lattes, an old Italian book 1979. 

Googleplex is waiting for this. New goal: digitizing the whole archival heritage

Googleplex is waiting for this

New goal: digitizing the whole archival heritage

  

     Google Books project started in 2010. When the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma took their first volumes destined to inaugurate the project of digitization of the library. 

     The volumes will become digital files, suitable to be stored and accessed in the near future thanks to the agreement signed between the MiBAC and Google Books in March 2010 for the digitization of a minimum of 500,000 texts up to a maximum of one million volumes.

     It is a project designed for the preservation of rare books and valuable, priceless heritage of libraries, large enhancement, use and disclosure of relevant materials. 

     For the first time, the works, now entrusted only to the transience of the paper, will be made accessible through the Internet in digital form.

     Prevention and recovery of stolen volumes, small restoration, virtual reconstruction of incomplete editions, consultation of the material without limits of space and time, are just some of the economic advantages which involves the project.

     For its part Google, at the express request the Ministry of Culture, has created a Scanning Center in Italy, where will the digitization and production of digital files of individual pages, text files generated by optical character recognition technology.

     But now we have to reach a new frontier: digitizing the whole archival heritage.

     It’s part of my research work and my ambitions. It’s also part of my desire to preserve the documentary heritage of my country.

     I digitized some important ancient documents now in a state of deterioration. I saved them from the ravages of time.

     Maybe Googleplex is waiting for this. 

     Look at my résumé. 

Legacy of Apple. The lesson from Steve Jobs

The obstacles make the man

     The death of Steve Jobs brings us back to June 12, 2005 when Stanford University, on the occasion of the delivery of degree parchments, it could hear the speech by the head of Apple, who had left the University. Isn’t a contradiction. The expensive college didn’t seem to provide him an opportunity, and not even the clarity to understand his vocation. 

     Following curiosities and interests made his way to unexpected results. The skills acquired free were, some time later, a practical application in his life. Everything happens for a reason. Drop out of college to find new life elsewhere has created a ramification of events on a global scale. Even behind the paradox of being laid off by created company, though lost, he discovered the presence of a superior design: "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again." Wrapped in creativity he founded NeXT, Pixar (that created the first computer animated film, Toy Story) and with his wife, another great 'holding': family. In quality of avid reader of the newspaper "The whole earth catalog," he recalls the maximum of the last no.: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Firmly convinced that the failures are the best place for forced to think differently and creatively, Jobs claimed that there was no reason not to follow our heart, "Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown out our inner voice. We must have the courage to follow our heart and intuition. They know what we really want to become". Commit us to his message continues to thrive among young people.

     The Rectors/Deans tells fables when stating the capacity of the University to train competitive youngs. Still, sometimes we feel compassion for the student who flew over the area of study instead of studying it. Since one student has the ability to determine which teaching is "profitable" for his training? And since he/she know what thing will take to meet the challenges imposed by the world of work? It’s well known that many are used to study a little and less they try to do it, they feel it so hard and so difficult to concentrate. But humor them is a badly: off creativity, reduces the flame of insight and preclude the opportunity to discover their real vocation. History, art, novels, films and Steve Jobs teach us that the presence of an obstacle is the necessary condition to harden. Are the obstacles to embellish path and goal. A training institution should encourage students to cope with the difficulties and not make soften it. Or abandon them. Support and advice are essential, but we must give them the desire to assert themselves and not make them crippled. 

     Source: "La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno", an italian newspaper, October 11, 2011, p. 24.

Farewell, indeed, goodbye Neil Alden Armstrong

     He was born in 1930 in the state of Ohio and holds a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1955. He became a civilian pilot and worked for NASA. Later, he was selected as an astronaut in 1962.

     He participated in the Gemini program, commanding the Gemini 8 mission, in 1966.

     In 1968 he was appointed commander of the backup crew of Apollo 8 mission.

     One year before the landing he risked his life in a training.

     1969 changed his life: he commanded the Apollo 11 mission who made the historic landing on the Moon. On the approach to the ground, Armstrong picked up the manual controls of the LEM called Eagle, and uttered the first words of the mission, became by now part of history:

     "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed".

     Out of the Lunar Module, he was the first man to set foot on the Moon, its footprint is the most popular in the world. During contact with the selenic ground uttered his most famous phrase:

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind".

     He left NASA in 1970.

     From the book Theatrum mundi. Landing on the Moon, p. 49-50. Dedicated to you.

     He left all of us on August 25, 2012. In circumstances like this we distance ourselves from the debate about the truthfulness of landing. We pay homage to a record curriculum. Let's go back to that enchanted night, between 20 and 21 July 1969, the night when humanity, moved by the charm of progress, felt had to turn our gaze to the sky. It seems that not a theft has been committed in that night.

     Your death takes away a piece of history, astronomy, a piece of childhood for those who have dreamed the immensity of the universe and the galactic features.

     To Houston we say "ok Houston, the eagle has soared" and your name will mount in the firmament.

     To you we say farewell, indeed, see you if there is a place where we meet again. 

     Source: “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, an italian newspaper, August 28, 2012, p. 24. 

Wood’s lamp… to see the invisible

     Being able to see what isn’t visible to naked–eye has been one of the wishes that mankind has been able to satisfy gradually, over the centuries. To do this we have built many tools and it was as if our senses are enhanced. Telescopes, radioscopy, microscopes, seismographs, litmus paper... the list is rich and growing. 

     In the group of data collection and measurement instruments there is also the ultraviolet light (Wood’s lamp or black light). This valuable tool was invented by the American inventor Robert Williams Wood (1868–1955). The lamp emits ultraviolet rays which aren’t harmful to humans and able to highlight things that escape to a normal vision. The principle on which is based the Wood’s lamp is to excite the fluorescent and phosphorescent pigments present on fabrics, paper, bacteria, minerals, bills (printed on paper containing fluorescent fibrils reactive under UV light).

     The fields of application are manifold: biology, mineralogy, antiques, restoration, quality food analysis, checking bills. There’s a range of applications that could make red–hot the minds of those who have always dreamed of living an adventure as a forensic agent: this is the identification of organic liquids stains or traces. In dermatology this lamp is suitable to detect fungal infections or skin diseases such as vitiligo. In the foodindustry we can detect the occurrence of fungus that affect the quality of food. In microbiology the UV light makes fluorescent bacteria. In the field of paintings restoration Wood’s light is useful to find out the original colors that the age has deteriorated. We can also define if a painting has undergone previous restorations. There’s also a recreational use in clubs, amusement parks and tourist attractions in order to create fluorescence effects enhancing the white color of eyes, teeth and clothes (for Halloween if you wear a skeleton dressed the effect will be awesome… or frightening).

     The sector in which I was directly involved is paleography. In the study of ancient documents, parchments, registers, records, papyrus, we come across in the most feared opponent: the deterioration due to time or to negligence. But those portions of the manuscript text that appears lost forever, actually can be retrieved in a new light, the light emitted by the Wood’s lamp.