What Do You Want?
May is the month for commencement addresses. All over the country scholars, politicians, celebrities, teachers, and people considered to have something to say will stand up in front of graduating High School and College students to give them advice.
Most of that advice will admonish the students to go for their dreams, reach for the stars, and if they are determined enough they will get what they want.
This is the American dream, the American religion, and graduations are American liturgy.
Steve Jobs
One of the best examples of this is from Steve Jobs and the commencement address he gave at Stanford.
Most Americans express two ideas about the future. Either the grim atheist vision where the world is disenchanted so “make your own luck because there is no god so it’s up to you.” or the Disnefied world that IS kindly enchanted so just believe. Jobs, who founded Pixar, took the later approach.
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.
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.
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.
As proof above and beyond his success in the marketplace he talked about his battle against cancer. This was in 2005.
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.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t fine.
What Jobs failed to mention was that his decision to NOT live by the dogma of his doctors meant that he delayed surgery, which should have cured his rare form or curable pancreatic cancer but his dream of a body unpierced by surgery would cause his own death.
To the horror of his friends and wife, Jobs decided not to have surgery to remove the tumor, which was the only accepted medical approach. “I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,” he told me years later with a hint of regret. Specifically, he kept to a strict vegan diet, with large quantities of fresh carrot and fruit juices. To that regimen he added acupuncture, a variety of herbal remedies, and occasionally a few other treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting people around the country , including a psychic. For a while he was under the sway of a doctor who operated a natural healing clinic in southern California that stressed the use of organic herbs, juice fasts, frequent bowel cleansings , hydrotherapy, and the expression of all negative feelings.
Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (Kindle Locations 7827-7833). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
“I think Steve has such a strong desire for the world to be a certain way that he wills it to be that way,” Levinson speculated . “Sometimes it doesn’t work. Reality is unforgiving.” The flip side of his wondrous ability to focus was his fearsome willingness to filter out things he did not wish to deal with. This led to many of his great breakthroughs, but it could also backfire. “He has that ability to ignore stuff he doesn’t want to confront,” Powell explained. “It’s just the way he’s wired.” Whether it involved personal topics relating to his family and marriage, or professional issues relating to engineering or business challenges, or health and cancer issues, Jobs sometimes simply didn’t engage. In the past he had been rewarded for what his wife called his “magical thinking”— his assumption that he could will things to be as he wanted. But cancer does not work that way. Powell enlisted everyone close to him, including his sister Mona Simpson, to try to bring him around. In July 2004 a CAT scan showed that the tumor had grown and possibly spread . It forced him to face reality.
Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (pp. 454-455). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
To Be Human is to Desire
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