Steve jobs speech at Stanford Video: Stay Hungry Stay Foolish.

This is an amazing speech by Steve Jobs in Stanford University's graduation ceremony!



Here is the complete text.

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.

Amazing Snooker Shots Video

Compilation of some of most amazing shots in Snooker.

Web Tools for Free - I

Following are some of the web tools which are FREE and can be highly useful

Alternatives to Microsoft Office for FREE

1) Openoffice.org This is probably the best alternative if you don't want to use the expensive Microsoft office suite at home. I have used it extensively for editing excels and haven't faced problems till date.

2) ThinkFree - I haven't used it extensively but it can provide the means of editing your excel and word files online.

Online Calendar Services

1) HipCal

2) Plazo

Accessing your Files from Anywhere

1) Avvenu

How to sync your Thumbfile with back up folder on your machine.

1) Windows Briefcase In Windows explorer, select your drive and click File->New->Briefcase. Copy the files into the Briefcase folder. To keep files in the briefcase sync with the source files on PC, select the briefcase and choose Briefcase->Update All. A dialog box shows what needs to be updated and offer options.

2) SyncToy

Cool Video - Ganesh Hegde

Very Cool Video and amazing dance!! by Ganesh Hegde

Ind-Pak 2004 Multan Test: Dravid's Declaration

Why start the discussion now? Because some discussions don't lose their sheen ever. They are always good to discuss. Same is this one. Even more when India is about to begin their 1st Test in a couple of days. What's better than to start this now and build up the tempo. Since we had a discussion last time I thought some more about it and decided to write this blog. Anyway to continue ....

Ind Vs Pak 2004 Multan Test is best remembered for Virendra Sehwag's 309 or first ever triple hundred by an Indian batsman. Well this was undoubtedly the statistical highlight of the match, Dravid's Declaration when India was 675/5 was another most talked about topic. Reason being it left tendulkar just 6 short of another double century.

I still find it pretty amazing that it created so much controversy at that time and will be probably discussed everytime Multan Test is going to be discussed. Add it to the fact that tendulkar came out saying that he was "disappointed" and "surprised" with the timing of the declaration.

Tendulkar can be disappointed with the declaration but shouldn't he be aware that this was going to happen. Well as per some of the articles he was told not once but twice of the declaration. But the point here is not if he was informed or not before the declaration was made. More importantly why it was such a big deal if tendulkar is left stranded on 194.

Well personally speaking I understand that it should not have taken a lot of time for tendulkar to score the left over 6 runs to complete his 200. What I fail to understand is the amount of interest everybody had with completing the tendulkar's 200 rather than seeing how much India need to score to win this game. There was no discussion if the scored runs were sufficient to win the game. There was no discussion that scoring 700 would have given India a pyschological advantage. Given the fact that it was just the second day of the game nobody knew what would happen in the coming days of the match, like how much the pitch is going to turn, will the time available be sufficient for the Indian bowlers to bowl out pakistan twice. Also Tendulkar had scored 3 more double hundreds before this one. Why so much bother about another double hundred. It's not a triple hundred that no Indian has done before this match. Nobody will remember tendulkar for 4/5 double hundreds, they will remember him the way he thrashed shane warne when Aussies visited India for the famous series which India eventually won 2-1. Everybody will remember him the way he took India singlehadedly to the finals in sharjah and many other wins which became possible only because of Tendulkar. So why bother for another double hundred.

Another interesting discussion point is "what if the person left stranded on 194" was not tendulkar. What if it was somebody else. Well those are the ifs and buts, but still pretty open to anybody's assumption. I think we can leave that aside anyway.

I fail to understand in a game like Cricket which is played by 11 players why personal milestone means so much. Why can't they be ignored for the sake of team. Not to say that I am not a big fan of Tendulkar. He is probably the most attractive batsman in world cricket but then doesn't give him or anybody the right to put personal milestones above team. What do you say?

GoogLeee - Cool things you can do with Google.

I have been reading a few things here and there which I found really cool using google. Not to mention that I am big fan of google( as obviously I use Blogger/Gmail/Google Desktop/Google Earth/Google Local and a lot more). Well this is the regular stuff which probably most of us might be using. But here are some other interesting stuff too which I was also not knowing sometime back and which can save sometime. Check this out. All of this courtsey Google Blog

1) Trends:

If you have been using the personalized search history, this feature helps you to see the trends for your search from the past.

2) Track Packages

Will your package arrive in time? Entering a UPS, USPS or Federal Express tracking number into a Google search box will give you an update on your shipment before you can say "overnight shipping."

3) Find Toll-Free Numbers

OK, here's a secret "the man" doesn't want you to know. Some companies have a toll-free number that's buried deep on their website -- but it would take like a thousand clicks to find it, and these days, who has the time? One way to get to it more quickly is to search Google for the company name and the phrase "customer support." Like this: TiVo Customer Support.

An even trickier way to get at hard-to-reach customer support phone numbers is to search for the company name and the standard toll-free prefixes. That'll dig up some real gems. For example, "[company name] 800 OR 877 OR 888 OR 866". Give it a whirl -- and here's to less holiday stress


4) 2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

The new search trends on Google. What moved up, what came down and etc etc.

Las Vegas

I believe if there is one place any person coming to US must see is Vegas. Terms like "More", "Excess" seems to lose their relevence there. So after 3 years of being in US I decided to visit Las Vegas and see what "More" really means.

Well the entire trip we planned was for 4 days and 4 nites with one day set aside for Grand Canayon. Based on the my visit to Vegas I think the entire trip can be divided as Hotels, Shows and Casinos(Personal tips for winning at casinos). Then there are some paid shows which offer some of the best artists from all over the world performing live in front of you. This can vary from Celine Dione to some of the best acrobats in the show business. If you are in luck you can get some of these tickets for free. Otherwise you can them for half the price.Click on each of these links for more details about Vegas.