Freaks of innovative technology know Jobs for being the brain behind Apple, makers of Macintosh, ipad, ipod, iphone, etc. Although Jobs died in October 2011, his memory lingers, especially as one of the most innovative people the world has ever known. In the succeeding address, he shares with Stanford University graduands three stories from his life  stories that thrill, entertain and motivate, and a must ready for everyone. He titles the entire piece Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.   

STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH

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 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.

Part 3 to be continued…

Freaks of innovative technology know Jobs for being the brain behind Apple, makers of Macintosh, ipad, ipod, iphone, etc. Although Jobs died in October 2011, his memory lingers, especially as one of the most innovative people the world has ever known. In the succeeding address, he shares with Stanford University graduands three stories from his life – stories that thrill, entertain and motivate, and a must ready for everyone. He titles the entire piece Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.   

STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH

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.

1. 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.

Part 2 to be continued…

I live in the part of Enugu, Nigeria, where there are many trees. Whenever I retire from the hustle and bustle of urban Enugu, I regain respite from the serenity and naturalness of my suburb-home. I’ve always loved it, especially the characteristic fresh air and the inspiring quietude. We even have a small stream there. Sometimes I just go down there to clear my head, especially whenever it looks like I’d exhausted all available options on a given matter. We also have a beach there, one full of fine sand and water; very beautiful and scenic. I’ve been there just ones, but that ‘just ones’ gave me an unrepeatable and unforgettable experience. To say the least, my suburban neighborhood is chic!

Did I just say, “is chic”? That was a mistake; I meant to say “was chic.” I’m even already contemplating moving from there. What happened, you may be wondering. Simple: the guys from town came around. And you can already guess what’s happening there right now. Yes, it is so bad that someone already built a house right next to the stream, and, as it were, destroying the awe-inspiring vegetation that made me fall in love with that stream. In fact, the last time I went there was a long time ago. What about the beach? The first and only time I visited revealed that things were already falling apart: tippers move hundreds of trips of sand away from it every single day; others have turned the place into a mining site for stone – they just keep digging and digging. What about the trees? You can be sure that at least a couple of trees go down every single day.

There is something I particular noticed with the plunderers of my beloved suburb: ignorance. I watch the man chopping down the trees and all I notice is that the trees being fell appear to be his only problem on this whole wide earth. He appears not to be in the know that he is contributing his quota to the problem we’re all suffering now: climate change. I watch the man moving the sand from the beach and the one digging up stones, and all I see are people who are trying to either make ends meet or secure a better life for their family and other dependants. I look at the man knocking down trees and erecting condominiums, and all I see is a man trying to secure assets for the security of his and his family’s financial future.

On a second thought, what if they knew? What if they all knew that their actions were negatively impacting on humanity’s collective future? Would they have called it a quit? I doubt. The fellow who doesn’t know the meaning of ‘climate change’ may be excused, but some of the guys responsible for gas flaring at refineries are products the Ox-bridges. Some of the many factories in China and America that produce fumes and toxic wastes substantial enough to turn things upside-down are state-owned. Come to think of it, too, if the village stark illiterate were to be told the implications of felling trees, bush burning and other sundry activities that warm up the globe, would he/she stop? I doubt. At the end of the day, we’re all guilty as charged. Humans are somehow wont to having their way today regardless of future consequences.

The past weeks have been terribly hot in Enugu, and everyone is gone acomplaining. The complaint is so heavy that someone wondered if the last person that entered hell left the door ajar, such that some of the heat from the eternal burning fire of hell is getting to us. Of course, very very few remember that what goes around comes around; we sowed heat and we’re getting warmed.

Truth be told, it’s never been known that one ate his/her cake and still had it. And, it’s never gonna change now.

Definitions are very important for the reason that they tell us the areas a given word can apply. Put differently, they set out the boundaries of a word’s applicability. In the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, the word come is shown to be capable of applying in 9 different contexts and can be used to form many phrases. When we talk about hunger in the sphere of poverty reduction, we’re wont to alluding to just one meaning of hunger and this is inappropriate. Its inappropriateness leans against the backdrop that we’re cowed into holding a single story of hunger. “And the problem with single stories,” observed Chimamanda Adichie, “is not that they’re untrue, but that they’re incomplete.” Of course, we can’t afford to work with “incompleteness” in our fight against hunger.

My dictionary, Macmillan, renders 3 meanings of hunger:

1. A lack of food that can cause illness or death, especially among large numbers of people: STARVATION.
2. The feeling you have when you need to eat something.
3. The feeling you have when you want something very much.

Seen thus, hunger is both a lack and a feeling. And to meaningfully relate with hunger, we must bear these elements, lack and feeling, in mind, and also proffer solutions that gear towards simultaneously dealing with both. Yes, for the one who lacks always feels, while the one who now has but yet feels will soon lack.

My point here is that we’re all hungry in different ways, and are in dire need of hunger reduction and/or eradication. I must immediately add that this hunger issue is so complicated that only a comprehensive solution is the way forward. This complication hinges on the fact that as some people “want something very much,” some other people correspondingly get to “lack food” and other provisions of fundamental relevance to meaningful livelihood.

Let me explain further. Relative to available resources, human wants are insatiable. That notwithstanding, we’re in the know that humanity’s commonwealth can bear the brunt of hunger and starvation. This is a fact, and one testimony in support of it is that Bill Gates’ $86billion net-worth exceeds the yearly budgetary allocation of a number of countries. This is just one man! Of course, I’m not in for the industry argument here; I only demonstrated that we’ve enough.

The way forward…

We must preach contentment and simplicity and discipline

Hunger fighters are wont to having recourse to material provisions, especially via governmental budgetary allocations, as the solution, and this is rightly so.

However, this is a quick-fix, and the problem with quick-fixes is that they are not far-reaching. The recent events in Nigeria is exemplary. It was pretty cheap for Buhari to distribute N5000 in lieu of employment, but how far can that amount go in the fight against hunger? He even ends up disowning that promise. And then let’s see how far the N500billion allotted to social security will go. Of course, it can’t go a long way.

Methinks that a bankable way forward – for the interim – are the trio of contentment, simplicity and discipline.

1. Contentment instructs us that while we can’t get it all, we can make do with what we have. Whenever we feel content, hunger is kept abay.

2. Simplicity is even the mother of genius. A simple lifestyle is a rich one, wherein maximum value is derived from lower cost – relative to value. The simple person’s philosophy is: live and let’s live. Of course, flamboyance and ostentatiousness cost real money.

3. Discipline helps us curb our desires. Knowing that hunger keeps recurring and that the joy of having increases by having, we get to know that there is no earthly solution to the problem of hunger. We can’t eat to all our heart’s content in one sitting, and we can’t possibly have it all. What do we do, then? Discipline helps us keep our calm.

The very idea of women empowerment presupposes that women lack power, for what is empowerment if not to give power or to make powerful. And the fact that there is no men empowerment suggests that men are already powerful; powerful enough not to need more power. Since at the end of the day both women and men lay claim to the same humanity and traceable to the same God, needless to say that this power distribution reflects a gross imbalance; it is even unjust.

On a second thought, when Jefferson and his friends quoted, as part of the American Declaration of Independence text, “All men were created equal and were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” did their men mean the collective humanity of both sexes or just the masculine gender? Given that the 1776 American woman wasn’t equally opportune as her American man counterpart, those revolutionaries would have, at best, been paying lip-service to the gender question. The fact that they even kept slaves betrays them further, for a slave does not know rights – not of life, not of liberty, talk less of the pursuit of happiness.

It is interesting that our own age and time has woken up to the reality of the gross gender imbalance and the fact that women are more often than not treated as second fiddles. We find this common interest in especially the naming of Gender Equality and Women Empowerment as one of the hitherto Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, and the up and running Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. Of course, it is laudable that the entire world, under the auspices of the United Nations, is speaking the same language in this regard. And we’re optimistic things will turn out for the better.

However, while the UN and the governments of her member-nations are strategizing on how to best realize this particular and peculiar goal, methinks that there are some very simple things we can all be doing every single day with a view to upturning the status quo in little little but significant ways. The following are needful:

1. Women must put their house in order

While a handful of women are doing something about the struggle for gender emancipation, a whole many others appear to be glorying in the status quo. Of course, they prefer the current order where it’s the man’s job to bread-win. Minus that, most of the inhumanities being meted out to women are carried out by women. Who executes female genital mutilation? Women. In some cultures, who accuses the widow of bearing a hand in the man’s death and have her drink the corpse’s bathwater? Women. Women appear to always be competing about one thing or the other, leaving us with the case of a kingdom divided against itself. To make headway in this gender thing, women must put their house in order in order to forge a common front.

2. Mothers must raise boys and girls in a new way

Socialization is everything! No human being is born with the sense of gender. It’s something we acquire as members of society, which is what culture is about. I’ve personally heard mothers tell their girls to respect their boys because they’re “men.” What sort of orientation is that? What do we make of the recurring scenario where the girl-child is programmed into subservience from Day 1? She must learn how to cook, take care of even her older brothers, “make” herself the “object” of men’s sexual appetite, etc. And then the boy is given license to lazy around and lord it over her sisters. This is mad. Mothers must ensure that boys and girls grow up to understand that neither masculine nor feminine is a superior gender; both are complementary.

3. Women should understand power in a better light

Days back Kim Kardashian posted a nude photo of hers that raised a lot of concerns on Twitter. She had to do an open letter afterwards to answer her critics. Part of that letter says, “I am empowered by my sexuality.” Nigerians would render this as “bottom-power” – power derivable from being sexy. “Bottom-power” is responsible for commercial sex work, for instance, and every other instance where women solely bank on their sexual prowess to get things done. Chimamanda Adichie says that “bottom-power” is not power at all. Her reason is not unconnected with the fact of “women objectification.”

In essence, women must become powerful by developing their potentials and getting busy at solving the many problems plaguing our collective essence as humans. Of course, the “bottom-power” thing is an advantage – not power qua power.

4. Men must be true to their women

As a reason for anything, “Because you’re a woman is not good enough.” Even women lift heavyweight. Why must the fact of being a woman pose a challenge to one? Men must demand that their women sit up. And yes they can! By not insisting our women rise up to the challenges of life, we encourage them to go lazy and lazy and lazy, such that they’re caught up in the intricate web of dependence. Truth be told, no real man wants to have a woman overly dependent on him. This example is inspiring. A man said to his wife: What if I die now what will you do? Of course, the women didn’t need any soothsayer to tell her that sitting up is not optional.