Don't Settle

We lost a genius yesterday. I'm not using the word lightly. One of, if not the world's best innovator has left the building. Thank God he had time to give us so much.

Apple Computer's main man and driving force, Steve Jobs, admired by many and despised by a few, lost his seven-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He couldn't innovate his way out of that one, very unfortunately. Jobs' life proved the existence of the American Dream. Strange, isn't it, that the way so many people heard of his passing was via a tool that he created and constantly improved upon.

I fondly remember that my first home computer was a Macintosh SE which I used along with a desktop publishing program, Aldus PageMaker, in the late 1980s to publish a financial newsletter first, and then a genealogy letter detailing my search through our family history. I can smile now remembering the limitations of that machine (it did have dual floppy disk drives!) compared to what we have today, but it was a start down the road that opened the computing world to everyone. Innovation at its very best.

I hope my sons and my grandkids—anyone reading this—will heed the advice Jobs gave to the Stanford University graduating class at their 2005 commencement ceremony. Take these challenges to heart and act upon them—now. After all, our time is limited.

"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. 

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“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.”