Tell me if that's not a bold statement!!
I had the profound pleasure yesterday in attending two interesting, indescribable kids events – my town's high school animation festival, and my town's grammar school carnival. Both were enlightening in supremely interesting ways.
Honorable Boy II yesterday craved to make a sand sculpture – you know, one of those thingees in which you pour colored sand in ribbons and then cap it off?
He made quite a nifty rainbow-colored train, and on the way home, asked me,
Gee Mom, what's your favorite part?
And I said, "Hmmm, probably the way the black and red go together, you really did a nice job."
And it WAS nice…until he decided to see what would happen if he (parents, you know what's coming) poured out all the sand at home, mixed it together and poured it back.
End result – a train sculpture that had mainly black sand with equal parts of color distributed, rendering it basically monotone for the entire length.
Now, that's all very well and good – it's his train, his sculpture, he can explore his creativity to the max with it. But then he said, "Mom, doesn't it now look more like a rainbow than ever?"
Ummmm, NO. It didn't. To me, it looked like a monotone mass of vague color.
So I told him,
No, there is no way whatsoever you can call that a rainbow. Certainly you can do with what you'd like, but the facts are, rainbows look like XYZ and your thingee now looks like ABC. Just WANTING it to be something…doesn't mean it IS.
Honorable Boy II's eyes filled with tears, so I had to explain to him, "Hey, it's okay! It's YOURS and what you do with it, if it's fine with you, that's all that matters….but do NOT get mad if the resulting reality is NOT what you want it to be."
After more discussions, his tears dried…and I taught him this beginning of life facts:
He cannot control what OTHERS think, but he can control how HE reacts.
The fact is: you cannot continuously praise your kids for sloppy stuff, even if their feelings get hurt.
- Their future bosses won't.
- Their spouses won't (or shouldn't).
- Their college professors will laugh hysterically at them.
It baffles me beyond all mortal sanity that some parents these days make sure the bar for their children is so low, the kids could play video games all day and they'll be lauded as the next CEO.
I'm currently going thru something like that myself, actually. After 3 years, I'm finally testing for my black belt in karate. Me, the one with the messed-up ankles and the body that refuses to flow.
Compare me to the 20-something year old senseis, and it's obvious – I will never ever ever reach their skills. Never. Ever. Heck, compare me to a few of the 16 year olds, and again – there's simply zero comparison. My ability in the Martial Arts – quite frankly, when compared to competent physically-fit folk….it leaves bunches to be desired.
And I know that people will look at me and me black belt and figure, alrighty now! Talk about something undeserving!
It used to bother me, you know….because in real life, I refuse to allow people to compliment me if I have not earned it. And back then, I equated a black-belt with physical mastery of the art.
However, I made peace with myself by realizing the following:
My body might be collapsing in a heap…but my inner spirit is strong, flexible, capable of storming the gates of Hell whenever necessary, AND, spirit-wise, I'd pit myself against just about any of the senseis in my dojo and feel confident I'd win.
In other words, I feel I've earned my black belt thru how I choose to tackle life….and how I choose to pass what I've learned on.
That's why it doesn't bother me any more if folks are deriding of my black belt. To me, a black belt comes from your heart, your soul and your spirit. The physical abilities (which my kids DO have, and wow, do I love watching!)…hey, it's out of my reach.
But that's okay. I'm okay with it…and I'm okay with how the world views it. What's important to me…is how I view it.
Which brings me back to your kids.
If you continuously praise them for a half-assed job, and build up their ego by rhapsodizing over a mediocre performance without even giving the kids a chance to recognize just WHAT they could do better…you're going to set them up for some massive heartache down the road.
Charles J. Sykes said it beautifully with these excellent rules.
- Rule 1:
Life is not fair – get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase "It's not fair" 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1. - Rule 2:
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself. - Rule 3:
You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both. - Rule 4:
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. When you screw up, he's not going to ask you how you feel about it. - Rule 5:
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping – they called it opportunity. They weren't embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend. - Rule 6:
It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of "It's my life," and "You're not the boss of me," and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it's on your dime. Don't whine about it, or you'll sound like a baby boomer. - Rule 7:
Before you were born your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom. - Rule 8:
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life. - Rule 9:
Life is not divided into semesters, and you don't get summers off. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. Very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time. - Rule 10:
Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. . - Rule 11:
Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
The above is one reason why I'm considered to be a rather horrible Mom to my kids. When my kids drop the ball, I show them where it happened, we discuss HOW it happened, and then we talk about how to bring up their work to a level of which they can be proud….even if initially, their feelings got hurt.
I'll close this rather long post with one of my favorite stories – it's the actual text of Steve Jobs commencement speech back in 2005. I do urge you to read it thru – it's incredible indeed. Full link is here. and the video is below.
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 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 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 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.
Enjoy,
Barbara Ling
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