I agreed to be a guest curator for a wonderful new website called Crescendoh. I am really excited about this, not only because its a wonderful organization but because it was the brainchild of a very inspiring woman, Jenny Doh. Many of us know Jenny from her days as Editor-in-Chief of our beloved Stampintgton publications. The website will be up and running soon http://www.crescendoh.com and in the meantime you can become a facebook fan by clicking here.
"CRESCENDOh actualizes its mission and values by creating an online presence where: • Like-minded creatives gather to shine light on the best projects and ideas from the online world. In doing so, CRESCENDOh builds an organic, home-grown development of increased visits to CRESCENDOh, resulting in a mutual home-grown development of increased visits to its linked sites. • In addition to the links to projects and ideas, CRESCENDOh helps tell unique and heartfelt ART SAVES stories from successful artists who serve as Guest Curators throughout the year. Through these stories, an organic and home-grown development of organizations born out of the stories grow. Reader-submitted stories about ART SAVES are also collected and shared, to help the CRESCENDOh community learn about the global power of art. • The concept ART SAVES is carried out further through exclusive ART SAVES Products that are sold in the shop. These products are created with original work by artists, with 100% of the proceeds going to a CRESCENDOh charity of choice. • All other facets of CRESCENDOh.com — CRESCENDOh TV, CRESCENDOh Radio, In the Know, Book and Product Reviews, and Proof Positive are all built to align and enhance the mission, values, and goals of CRESCENDOh."
As much as I abhor public speaking, in November 2007 I agreed to be the keynote speaker for the May 2008 Rochester RIDE for the MISSING for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. For those of you unfamiliar it is an event to raise money for John Walsh's organization for missing and exploited children-the riders agree to ride 100 miles through the city to raise awareness. You can read more about it here.
I just came across the speech I gave and it thought I would share it with you all...
Let me tell you about a man who has forever changed my life and the lives of so many people close to me. He is a man I have never met. Someone I will never meet. Here is his story...
He lived in squalor as a young toddler...so dirty his hair was falling out-a result of impetigo caused by horribly filthy living conditions. At age four he was raped by an adult male. He wore diapers until he was 7 years old due to incontinence...probably caused by sexual trauma at such a young age. Everyone made fun of him for this- especially his parents. His alcoholic father used to beat him because his mother had left the family. He had a criminal record dating to his early teens & drug abuse began shortly thereafter. His teenage diary tells the tales of painful ridicule by classmates. He contemplated suicide. In his senior year of high school he was sentenced to serve weekends in jail - a result of being convicted of sodomizing a 6 year old boy. He was given what was considered a 'light sentence' because the judge knew he had a difficult home life and felt compelled to take that into account. Later that year, he hung a stray cat at work one day -he said he feared it was coming after him. Perhaps it was easier for someone with his reality to exist in a fantasy. A positive test for cocaine ended the only real job he had ever held. Then his grandmother, the only one who had ever cared for him & loved him unconditionally, died. This is a terribly sad story. Unfortunately it gets worse. Much worse. Because one day he came to my town...
Three months later on July 3rd of 1992 myself, my parents and my 5 younger siblings were planning to attend the fourth of July carnival that was held ever year at Gypsy Bay park in our hometown of Cazenovia. We often met up with our friends the Googins and their 5 children. I received a phone call at work earlier... It was my mother in a panic~our close friend and neighbor Sean Googin had not shown up as scheduled to meet his parents at the park. He was to arrive there after finishing his dish washing job around the corner. Missing? At the time I recall not being worried, initially. After all, we lived in a very safe small town. In its 199 year history, it had never recorded so much as a single murder. Since it was Sean's absolute favorite holiday - when he failed to show up as planned and those minutes turned into hours, true panic began to set in. Before long the entire town joined in the search for our fifteen year old friend. We rallied at the fire station, we went out in our boats and we combed the lake. We banded together, we hoped for the best, and we prayed.
Sean was always been known for joking around and for his great sense of humor ~ but this was definitely no joke. He was missing... gone. The next day his lifeless body was found floating in the very lake where we had searched for him in the day before. He had been raped and strangled. His army coat weighted down by rocks in a childlike attempt to hinder his discovery. Sean had been an unfortunate victim of opportunity.
Interestingly, the head of homicide for the New York state troopers was the lifelong best friend of Sean's father. Denny Dougherty was set to retire that year but he vowed to stay on until Sean's brutal murder was solved. No one expected nine grueling years would pass before this momentous event. Thanks to the DNA database in February of 2001 the killer (already imprisoned for molesting a 14 year old boy at gunpoint recently) had finally been found. Denny made the call to Sean's parents.
The killer? A troubled man high on cocaine who had stumbled into our little town on that fateful night. His name was Jeffrey Clark...he is the man who began his life with the terribly abusive past that I described to you just moments ago.
Please understand I am not trying to paint a sympathetic picture of Sean's killer or make excuses for his insidious crimes. I merely described what I know of his past as a way to point out that the abuse of this young child had ended with the snuffing out the candle of a beautiful young boy with boundless potential. A boy he had never met.
Childhood sexual abuse is like a tsunami...it begins far in the distance slowly growing in size and intensity~maybe causing a few blips on the radar here and there~until one day it finally reaches shore and devastates an entire community. How many red flags were waving in Jeffrey Clark's childhood that went ignored? How many times had people turned the other way instead of getting involved or stepping in? Would this have changed the tragic outcome of that summer day so long ago? We will never know. What I do know is this....if you see something, something that does not seem quite right. Something that seems even a bit off, a flag of any shade of red at all.... Please....report it. It IS your business. You just might change or save a life.
16 years have passed since Sean's murder. So much has changed. I moved away. I met the man of my dreams & got married. I am a mother of two children now. We live in a quaint town most people consider very safe. For me, not one day goes by where I believe my children are completely safe. This experience has changed the way I view society. It has made me more aware of the need to listen closely when your children speak to you- to really hear what they are saying. To look for the subtle signs in children and adults alike.
For the past several years I have been a speaker's bureau volunteer with the NCMEC. After my most recent training session, I asked if I could assist with the preschool speakers program because I feel very strongly that children, as soon as they are old enough to listen, need to be armed with the knowledge that its all right to speak up when that little 'uh-oh' feeling kicks in. Its the only way to avoid another lifechanging -or life ending- event. This fall I am proud to begin my volunteer position with the National Centers for Missing & Exploited Children as a pre-school program speaker.
Its important to note that I am not at all comfortable with any of this. I don't enjoy telling this story or recalling the details. Each time I speak of this intensely private matter I am reminded of the tragedy that occurred so many years ago and the ripple effect that continues to follow it. But the importance of giving Sean a voice & keeping his memory alive is just too overwhelming.
So what good can be taken from this terrible tragedy? The answer may surprise you - because it surprises me...though it is the same each & every time. It is the healing power of true forgiveness. Please allow me to introduce you to someone who YOU will never meet, someone who I hope will affect YOUR lives forever...one of the most amazing women I have ever had the good fortune to know. Sean's mother, Jan. Since that day I have seen Jan from time to time. She is still close with my family. Recently when I spoke to her she told me that despite the pain and loss their family suffered through, that she & her family have decided they must forgive the man who took Sean from them. When I asked her how this could be she said 'We forgave him in order to move on....we had to.'
I understand that forgiveness may not be possible for every victim or victim's family- it was the answer for this family. Each of us is here today for a different reason...whatever your reason, I hope that hearing Sean's story will inspire you. May the inspiration for a better tomorrow be the wind beneath your wings as you ride today. Thank you!
A few years ago I came across some really beautiful drawings of hats from 1780s France. As expected they were stained, faded and otherwise showing signs of their age. I spent several days restoring them via the magic of the computer and put each into its own well deserved 'frame' and am now offering them in collage sheet format here beginning today. Here is how the beauties turned out....
I would never trade my amazing friends, my wonderful life, my loving family for less gray hair or a flatter belly. As I've aged, I've become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I've become my own friend. I don't chide myself for eating that extra cookie, or for not making my bed, or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn't need, but looks so avante garde on my patio. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant.
I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging.
Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 60 &70's, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love ... I will.
I will walk the beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a (slightly) bulging body, and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set.
They, too, will get old. I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And I eventually remember the important things.
Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody's beloved pet gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.
I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so may have died before their hair could turn silver.
As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don't question myself anymore. I've even earned the right to be wrong.
So, to answer your question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. And I shall eat dessert every single day(if I feel like it).
I love books and I always save everything I read. I have a collection of late 1800s and early 1900s book plates and really adore them. Recently I decided to retouch them and offer them here for you. I will have them available printed on peel and stick paper as soon as I finish putting the final touches on them. I am curious to know if anyone would prefer them printed on regular paper (not sticker paper) as well? I am still considering whether to list them both ways...
I saw this article recently and thought it was worth sharing...
People's tendency to look at the negative By Carolyn Hax Adapted from a recent online discussion.
Dear Carolyn:
I recently read one of your columns where you said it was easy to be unhappy. Do you think it's easier than being happy? With now many years of experience under your belt, why do you think people protect their bitterness, anger, weaknesses and past traumas to the end, no matter what they lose? I've watched some people lose almost everything and everyone in order to hang on to what a friend called "their triumphant unhappiness."
~Anonymous
REPLY:
I love that phrase, please thank your friend for it.
Yes, I do think it's easier day-to-day to be unhappy. Meaning, when we're faced with these little decisions about how to perceive something, it's always a little bit easier to blame than it is to celebrate. For example, how often is it "another bleeping meeting" vs. a chance to leave your desk, see some people, scam a doughnut?
And it's always a little bit easier to put that blame on someone/something else: "Guys are such jerks" is easier than "I missed obvious signs that he didn't like me," or "I expected him to read my mind and be my little puppet, when in fact I didn't pay any attention to what he might have wanted or the ways I might have dismissed his feelings."
That's why I think it's harder in the short run to choose celebration over blame -- you have to take responsibility for more of your own bad outcomes. "He's a great guy" becomes, when it doesn't work out: "He really is a great guy, he just doesn't love me," or "I took him for granted, and didn't treat him the way he deserved." It's so much easier to save face with "I thought he was a great guy, but he was just another loser."
In the long run, though, those little easy choices make life so much harder. When you're cumulatively pessimistic and/or fundamentally negative, you're actively choosing to accept a lower allotment of joy.
Even calling it "joy" is deceiving, because joy sounds easy. However, when it means being grateful even when something isn't going exactly as you had hoped -- and often when you're plainly receiving less than someone else -- then suddenly it isn't so easy.
When you feel wronged and angry and you're awaiting your apology or due or whatever, choosing joy means accepting that someone got the best of you and you'll never get your due. It means accepting that any joy in your future will have to be of your own making. Ego out, perspective in.
Optimism also demands that you greet new people and situations with an open mind, instead of just lumping them into some lazy category of Things You Already Know. When we prejudge, we close doors, deny opportunities, marinate ourselves in the past.
To have an open mind, though, we have to assign ourselves to the role of students in life, and to not knowing the outcome in advance. It's trading the secure (if false) sensation of being wise to everyone and everything, for the possibility of surprise, be it pleasant or un-.
Choosing optimism is choosing vulnerability and humility on an ongoing basis, and that's often in conflict with our nature.
I spent the past couple of (very) snowy days sitting by the fire and assembling a handful of new necklaces comprised mostly of salvaged vintage pieces....everything from chandelier crystals to buttons to salt shakers! Here are some photos...let me know what you think!
No one ever forged their success on the anvil of complacency. The process of reflection is pretty common, especially in these early days of January each year~but what is far less than common is taking the time to take an active role in how the upcoming year will shape up. This process of self reflection helps maintain a conscious awareness of where we’ve been ...but the second half of the equation, the planning, will take us where we intend to go.
I suggest taking 30 minutes per week, perhaps on a quiet Sunday evening to ask yourself these twenty questions...every week...all year.
1. What did I learn in the last week? This should be an easy one. If you struggle for an answer, perhaps something needs to change. Regardless of how old you are or how smart you fancy yourself....you should be learning something new every week. It doesnt have to be something huge, just something new.
2. What was my greatest accomplishment over the past week? Taking time to revel in the satisfaction of your accomplishments each week not only allows us to see how far we have come, it also gives us the confidence and motivation to take on the upcoming week. You should only be in competition with one person- yourself...to be the best that you can be.
3. Which moment from the past week was my most memorable...and why? Recalling what we felt was important in a given moment reminds us what is most important to our most inner self. If it was memorable to you, perhaps it would be memorable to others and can be worked into your goals. Be sure to share with others what you found most memorable each week and take the time to hear what they found notable. Knowing yourself and whats important to you is something many of us sadly take forgranted.
4. What was easy for me in the past week? If its easy for you, quite simply- its a strength. Capitalize on your strengths and know what you are good at- use them to your advantage.
5. What were my biggest struggles in the past week? Take a few moments to determine what kept you from your progress this week. It may have been something completely out of your control. Other times, its procrastination in disguise. Putting the setbacks to reast each week will not only give yourself a break for realizing sometimes things dont go just as planned- but it also helps us plan for future setbacks.
6. What can I do now to reduce my stress in the upcoming week? Being organized and getting small tasks done in advance are huge time savers and generally reduce stress exponentially. Things such as packing lunches in advance, getting gas, having the laundry done will free up more time to get your goals accomplished. When your brain is filled with menial tasks that must be done it draws our attention from our goals. Get them done ahead of time and they will be off the table, leaving you more time to dedicate to the week's goals.
7. Where did I waste the most time last week? Simply put-figure out what things you spent too much unnecessary time on last week and strive to avoid making the same pitfalls in the coming week. Remember....Lost time is never found again.
8. Wash the slate clean of...? What excess baggage (physical or emotional) am I carrying that I can put down and not carry into the upcoming week with me. The lighter you travel, the easier the journey.
9. What have I been avoiding? We all have things we love to avoid (sometimes for weeks at a time). Set up some time to get these undesirables off your plate.
10. Who do I need to talk to? Make a concerted effort to maintain regular communication with those close to you. Make the same effort with new contacts-try to meet at least one new potential networking opportunity each week.
11. Who do I need to thank? Gratitude. Remember to thank people, often. Send a note to someone new every week....even if its a thank you email for someone leaving a kind comment on your blog. People will remember it.
12. Who can I help this week? Realizing there are other people in the world seems easy enough but sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own life we forget others may need a helping hand. Again, it doesnt need to be earth shattering...send along a helpful link, leave a sympathetic comment to someone expressing sadness... a little goes a long way.
13. What are my top three goals for the short term (next 1-3 years)? You won't make notable progressions in life if you don’t setup realistic (<---key word) short term goals for yourself. Your pride will come in realizing these goals. Weekly checks help you get there.
14. Have my recent actions moved me any closer to my goals? Decide which things you have done in the past week which were most efficient. if you cant think of how something moved you closer to your goal, perhaps its time to reassess your need for that activity.
15. What’s the next step for each goal? Goals work cumulatively, don't miss a step or the end result may not be what you had hoped for. As much as possible, be sure you are on track each week. If something has taken a back seat due to life circumstances....make a concerted effort to make it happen in the coming week.
16. What am I looking forward to during the upcoming week? Herein lies your motivation. If you are unable to think of anything, schedule something to look forward to.
17. What am I afraid of? Consciously address your fears on a weekly basis and slowly work on resolving them. For some of us this is something as simple as the fear of success....sounds crazy but I have encountered more people than I care to admit who are actually fearful of their own success and tend to put a very short ceiling overhead. The sky can be the limit, trust yourself. Also, measure your success with your own ruler. Don't allow someone else's idea of success to cloud your pride of accomplishment.
18. If I knew I only had a week to live, how would I choose to spend my time and with whom? Life is very short, in fact- shorter every second. Be cognizant of the moments you have and how you spend them. We all have things we MUST do but try not to waste too much time on other's obligations. Try to spend more time with the people you care about- you never know when or if you will see them again.
19. Are the goals I am working on still in line with what I want? True wisdom is the byproduct of life experiences. Sometimes as we go along we realize that some of the goals we have set for ourselves are no longer in line with what we wish to accomplish for ourselves. Things change. As long as you dont find yourself just ditching your goals randomly, feel free to give yourself a pass to say that perhaps this is no longer for me and I need to rid it from my goals sheet in order to move forward with my other plans.
20. What am I most grateful for? Being grateful is something most of us take forgranted. Its all about the little things. It’s a smart way to keep things in perspective and something to bring to the forefront of your mind regularly.
Goals: They are a necessary evil, a way to measure ourselves against what we expect from ourselves. We expect much from others, yet sometimes neglect to expect much from ourselves. Don;t wake up and go through the motions every day. Live your life, don't merely exist in it. As this new year dawns, its a great time to take stock of where we are and where we will be at the beginning of next year. You'll notice I said where we WILL be and not where we HOPE TO be... You know what you want and where you want to be. Now you have to make it happen for yourself. Time is precious, manage yours effectively. You've got 52 Sundays....GO!
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Lookie at what I found! A gorgeous new book from Sibella Court, called Etcetera. Its packed with photos and ideas galore. Each more breathtaking than the next. Ill let the pictures do the talking...
This is a tough book to find, since it was just realeased here in the US. Its well worth the hunt. Trust me.
Steve Jobs' Commencement Speech from Stanford 2005. Inspiring words...
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
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.
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A great speech written from a true American success story. As many of you who know me know....I adore quotes and because I am feeling particularly inspired this evening, here are some inspiring words of wisdom by some very heavy hitters... Perhaps they will awake us to some imspired ideas in this New Year
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