all right welcome back to the daily mastermind my name is George Wright III I am your host and if this is your first time joining us I am so glad that you're here thanks for listening and I hope that we can get you some inspiration and motivation to be able to help you throughout your day now I've been traveling a lot over the last couple of weeks actually a couple of months and launching several businesses and we have some amazing stuff that I hope to be able to share with you that'll help you in your journey and help you with business, personal, finance, communication, everything that we like to focus on here on the podcast. But what I want to do right now is I want to start with the Daily Mastermind quote of the day. And the quote of the day is, success is never final and failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts. I really love that. I love that quote. Now this morning I was listening to one of the greatest commencement speeches of all times done by Steve Jobs. You know, I do this occasionally in my morning routine just to kind of glean words of inspiration and motivation from really successful business professionals or thought leaders. And it's a great way for me to get kind of a quick dose of behind the scenes because a lot of these successful people will, they'll share thoughts and insights and lessons they've learned in their life because they're trying to give advice to graduates from college. And this speech that I listened to was one of the best ones out there. I know it's been rated really high and I decided that what I wanted to do today is just read you a transcript of this commencement speech because there were so many nuggets and it was distilled to such an unbelievable amount of information and it's not very long. So I'm going to read this to you and I hope, my hope is that you'll be able to glean just as much wisdom, ideas, knowledge that I got from it. So I'm going to read this commencement speech of Steve Jobs and I'll include a transcript of it in the show notes as well so feel free to go check that out and you could print a copy and kind of go through it yourself that's what I do sometimes I'll highlight little highlights little you know quick golden nuggets that are in there so without any further ado let's go ahead and get started so this is Steve Jobs commencement speech I'm 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. And the first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after about six months, but then I stayed around and dropped in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? He says, it started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college 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 when I popped out, they decided at the last minute they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, his current adopted parents, got a call in the middle of the night saying, we have an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him? And of course they said yes. My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated college and my father had never graduated from high school, so 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. 17 years later I did go to college but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford and all my working parents savings were being spent on my college tuition So after six months when I wasn seeing 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 my money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would still be okay. It was pretty scary for me and remember he couldn't see value in it at the time but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop talking, or I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and I could 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 my friend's rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposit to buy food with, and I would walk seven 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 an example. Reed College at the time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed, I guess, before I had dropped out and I didn't, 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 the different letter combinations, about what makes great topography great. It was beautiful, historical, subtle in a way that science couldn'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 topography. 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 that calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful topography they do today. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking back 10 years later. And again, listen to this carefully. 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 it is. That approach has never let me down and it has made all the difference in my life. I love that story. Then he goes on to say, my second story is about love and loss. I was lucky I found what I love to do early in life. Was 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 two billion dollar 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 could 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 adult life was gone and it was devastating I really didn 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 and as it was 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 with what I did, 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, and it freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company called Next, another company called 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 Laureen and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure that 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, this is really important, listen to this, 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 do things you love to 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. I love that advice. Then he goes on with his third story, and his third story is about death. He says, when I was 17, I read a quote that went something like this. If you live each day of your life, if it were your last, someday you'll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, if today were the last day of my life, what would I want to do and what am I about to do today? And whenever the answer was too many no's, I'm sorry, let me read that quote again. If today were the last day of my life, would I want to be doing what I'm doing today? And whenever the answer had been no for too many days in a row, I know I needed to change something. So remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, fear of embarrassment and failure, these all just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you're going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose. You're 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 730 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor in 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 would expect to live no longer than three to six months My doctor advised me to go home and get your affairs in order and that doctor code for prepare to die It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day, And later that evening, I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, and into my intestines and put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife was there, told me that they viewed the cells under a microscope and that the doctor began 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 know 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, that 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'll be gradually becoming the old and be cleared away sorry to be so dramatic but it's quite true your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma. I love this point here, so listen carefully. 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 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. That right there, there's a couple more paragraphs in that commencement speech, but I got to tell you, those are three lessons that are just amazing, amazing to me. You can't connect the dots moving forward. You can only connect them going back. And so just trust and have faith. He talks about following your passion and following things that interest you and not getting caught up in the opinions of others and having the courage to follow what you want to do and know and trust your heart to make the right decisions. I think these are life lessons from one of the greatest businessmen of all time, a great thought leader, someone that has left a legacy. And I think if you look at this and go to the show notes and print them off, you can look at them, highlight them, refer to them. I love what the Stoic philosophers have used for many, many years, like Steve Jobs mentions here, that when you entertain the idea that you are going to die, the ideas force you to continue to pursue things that you're passionate about and that are important, knowing that all the other noise around you is gonna be gone in the end. And those are my thoughts for you. I hope that's something that'll inspire you to take some direction, take some decisions, follow what you're passionate about, follow what you truly love, because if you do what you truly love, you'll never work a day in your life. I hope those are thoughts that will help you. That's our message for today. Have an amazing day, and I will look forward to talking with you tomorrow. This is George Wright III, and this has been The Daily Mastermind. Talk soon.
