My Narrative

Presently It's not a big deal, simply three stories from my life that I would like to share with you.

The first tale concerns making connections. My biological mother, a young unmarried graduate student, decided to put me up for adoption because she felt strongly that I should be adopted by a college. I dropped out of Wesley College after the first six months, but I stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. Everything was planned for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, but when I came out, they changed their minds at the last minute and decided they really wanted a girl. As a result, my parents, who were waiting to be adopted, received a call in the middle of the night asking if they would like to adopt this unexpected baby boy.

Naturally, my biological mother refused to sign the final adoption papers because she later learned that my father had never completed high school and that my mother had never attended college was the beginning of my life, and 17 years later, I attended college. However, I foolishly picked a school that was nearly as expensive as Stanford, using all of my working-class parents' savings for college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it, didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, and didn't understand how college would help me figure it out. So, I dropped out, trusting that everything would work out. It was frightening at the time, but in retrospect, it was one of the best choices I ever made. It wasn't all romantic, I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on friends' floors, but the minute I dropped out, I was able to stop taking the obligatory classes that didn't interest me and start attending the ones that looked considerably more intriguing. I loved it, as well as a lot of what I discovered by pursuing my interest and walking the seven miles across town every Sunday night to eat one decent meal a week at the Hari Krishna Temple.

I also returned Coke bottles for the five cent deposits to use toward food purchases Later on, intuition proved to be invaluable. Let me give you an example. Because I had dropped out and was exempt from taking regular classes, the college I attended at the time may have provided the best calligraphy education in the nation. Every poster, label, and drawer on campus had exquisite hand calligraphy. To understand how to do this, I chose to enroll in a calligraphy class. There, I studied about Sans serif and serif typefaces and how to change the spacing between letters combinations of the elements that define outstanding typography If I hadn't taken that one course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have ever used any of this beautiful historical artistic subtlety that science is unable to capture.

I found it fascinating, but none of this had even the remotest chance of having any practical application in my life ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer. A computer would possess them. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very clear looking backwards. Ten years later, it is still impossible to connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. Therefore, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something your gut tells you. If I had never dropped out, I would never have attended that calligraphy class. Personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Karma in Destiny Life whatsoever, since having faith that the connections will emerge It will make all the difference when you have the courage to follow your heart even when it veers off the well-traveled path later on.

My second tale revolves around love and grief. I was fortunate to discover my passion early in life and, at the age of 20, I founded Zion in my parents' garage. We put in a lot of work, and in ten years, Zion went from being just the two of us in a garage to a one billion dollar business with over 1,000 workers. A year ago, we debuted the Macintosh, our greatest invention, and I recently turned thirty. suddenly I was let go; how can one be let go from a corporation that they did a good job of hiring? As Zion grew, we hired someone who I believed to be very talented to run the company alongside me. For the first year or so, things went well, but eventually we had a falling out, and when that happened, our board of directors sided with him. As a result, at the age of thirty, I was out and very publicly out, and it was devastating.

For a few months, I really didn't know what to do, and I felt like I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down by dropping the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David and White, and attempted to apologize for my egregious mistakes. I was a huge public failure, and I even considered leaving the valley, but gradually it dawned on me that I still loved what I did. The events at Zion had not altered; I had been rejected, but I was still in love, so I made the decision to start over. Little did I know that getting fired from Zion would turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to me; the weight of success was replaced by the Over the next five years, I founded two companies, one called Moves and another called Stone, and fell in love with an incredible woman who would eventually become my wife. The lightness of being a novice again and being less certain about things allowed me to enter one of the most creative times of my life. In a stunning turn of events, Stone went on to produce the first computer animated feature film ever, Toy Story, and is currently the most prosperous animation studio globally. After Zion purchased next, I went back to Nicole and I have a wonderful family, and Zion and the technology we developed together are at the core of Zion's current Renaissance. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Zion. The medicine tasted horrible, but the patient needed it at some point. Sometimes life hits you over the head with a brick. Don't give up; I firmly believe that the only thing that kept me going was how much I loved what I did. You must pursue your passions, and this applies to both your career and your relationships. Your work will occupy a significant portion of your life, so being happy in it is essential If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle because, like 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 go by. 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.

My third tale involves death. When I was seventeen, I came onto a saying that said, "If you live every day as if it's your last someday, you'll most certainly be right." It stuck with me, and for the next thirty-three years, I've looked in the mirror every day. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big life decisions because almost everything, external expectations, pride, fear of failure or embarrassment, and so on just falls away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Recalling that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Every morning, I ask myself, "If this were the last day of my life, what would I want to do what I am about to do today?” are already nude There's no reason not to follow your heart; nobody wants to die, not even those who want to go to heaven; however, death is the destination we all share; no one has ever escaped it, and that's perfectly fine because death is probably the best invention ever made; it's life's agent of change, clearing the old to make room for the new, which is you right now. However, in not too distant a future, you will gradually age and be cleared away; it's true that your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

Dogma is the outcome of living by other people's ideas. Don't let other people's beliefs overpower your inner voice. Most importantly, have the guts to follow your intuition and heart since they somehow already know what you should be. Everything else is just incidental. Continue to be hungry and foolish.