'Life is nothing but a fart in the breeze, until you follow your fart and see where it goes'

I swear this is the most messed-up kiss I’ve ever seen in my life.

They look like they’re about to eat each other alive.  My goodness….If I hadn’t known this was TLC’s new show, The Virgin Diaries, I would’ve thought this was a documentary show about zombies since that guy looks straight up like a zombie…LOL!

Have you ever been in a situation where you are in a hurry to go somewhere, but you are stuck walking in a crowded area where 99% of people there are walking very slowly?  In fact, they are probably slower than your 90-year-old grandma.  Well, the Japanese has come up with a brilliant idea to deal with these slow workers.  I am actually thinking of getting one of these for me.  Check this out!

Yes, it’s that time of the year again…. ZoukOut 2011!

And here’s the line-up:

• Armin van Buuren
• Bob Sinclar
• Chuckie
• Avicii
• Roger Sanchez
• Karizma
• Scratch Perverts
• Ladytron
• Ming
• Eclipse
• DJB
• Hong
• Jeremy Boon
• Aldrin
• Ghetto
• Pfadfinderei VJS
• Donn
• VJ Nakaichi, VJ Numan & Lighting Aiba (Womb)
• Kiat
• Simon Dunmore & Shovell
• Masterpiece
• Gui Boratto
• Funk Bast*rd & Kaye (Cosa Nostra)

I guess it’s time to start practicing some of my signature moves, such as Spinning the Pot of Love, Hitting the Air Drums, Fax Machine, Water Sprinkler, Shopping at Giant, the Running Convict, etc.

Has anyone read Steve Job’s speech that he gave at Stanford in 2005 for the graduation commencement?  Nobody brought it up again until recently when he announced his retirement.  I found it really touching and motivational as well.  When I was reading it again last night, it really reminded me of where I was exactly today, 11 years ago…

11 years ago I was hired as a part-time intern for E-site Marketing, a small marketing company located in Bethesda, MD.  It was my first real job and if I could recall, I believe I was only paid for $7/hour.  At that time, I thought I hit a jackpot (I had become tired of working at restaurants and I told myself I needed a change in my life).  I was poor, extremely poor I might add.  I only had $300 in my savings account (which was my monthly average) and I had been moving from one place to another since I could not afford to rent an apartment (I believe one time I slept in someone’s living room for months since I could not afford to pay for a full-rent).  Even $6-sandwich for lunch seemed very expensive to me at that time.  My school’s vending machines and I had a very special relationship.  Since I could not afford to get a proper meal, I would get most of my meal from vending machines.  I was even able to tell what kind of food was available in which vending machines.  Sometimes two chocolate bars were enough to fill me up for lunch.  It took me a while to graduate from college, and after I graduated, I had accumulated $14,000 school debt (half of it from several credit cards with 25% interest rate).  Yes, studying abroad is not all romantic.  I am not a part of the lucky sperm club and my parents are not even a millionaire.  Everything that we have accomplished is the result of hard work and faith.

Moving forward now, 11 years later, I live in Singapore and still working for the same company that hired me 11 years ago.  The difference is that our small company is now part of Sabre Holdings, a $2-billion company.  My school debt has been fully paid off – I can actually brag about this since I paid this on my own, without anyone’s help (it took me 7-8 years to pay off everything).  I am currently working with the greatest team in Asia Pacific (as well as in the US) doing something that I really love, and have the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world (even though I haven’t set foot in Europe yet, but it will happen soon!).  I can now buy or eat anything I want/like without having to think twice about the price (unless if it’s a thousand dollar watch, then I will still have to think twice about it).  I also feel grateful that I have close relationships with both of our CEO and Vice President – something that only a very few people have in our company.

I do not have any regrets of anything that happened to me in the past.  Things happen for a reason, even when you meet someone, there’s a reason/purpose why your path crossed with his/hers.  Every person that you met serves a purpose in your life.  I never regretted the day when my mom called and told me their savings had dried up and could not pay for my tuition anymore.  I had to move out and lived in a neighborhood which was not quiet safe at that time.  I never regretted the day when I had to move in to someone’s basement and sometimes I would have to sleep with socks and sweater on since the heater would automatically shut off in the middle of the night during winter time.  I never regretted the day when I had to work two shifts at the restaurant and when I got home, I was so tired and felt so much pain in my back that I could not even study/do my assignments.  All of these had happened for a reason.  I do not think I would be here right now if any of these had not had happened.  Just as Steve Jobs said, 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.

It is all about connecting the dots.  You can only connect the dots when you look backwards, not forward.

Having said that, I think it would be best to let you read his whole speech and hopefully, you can learn something from it.

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, it’s 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 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 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.

So there’s this guy who happens to be a good friend of mine, let’s just call him John, dating this one girl for the past couple of months. Sally, let’s just call her that, is a sweet girl, pretty, very friendly and has got all the best personalities every guy wants in a girl. Unfortunately for Sally, John isn’t really so much into her. She’s just not his type. He looks at Sally as more like mmm.. F buddy (if you know what I mean). He’s been hinting her, telling her indirectly that they’re not really meant to be together. Poor girl just doesn’t get it.

Anyways, one night John came by my apartment and told me he just messed something up. But it didn’t really look like he had any regrets about it, he was laughing and said not sure how he was going to be able to come out alive from this one.  So this is how the conversation went between me and John:

John: “Mann…I messed up! I think she’s gonna be mad at me!”

Me: “Huh? What do you mean?”

John: “Well, I got a call from Sam (his other friend), asking me to hang out with him tonight. But I was having dinner with this chick whom I met through this dating site and she’s really ugly man! So I txt’ed Sam back, telling him I’d have to get rid of this chick first before I meet him tonight.”

Me: “Uhm OK. So you were having dinner with another girl..and where’s Sally?”

John: “Sally’s busy. Anyways, when I txt’ed Sam back, I just realized I txt’ed the wrong person! I didn’t txt Sam…I txt’ed Sally instead!”

He then proceeded to show me his text message.

I swear when I read it, I had never laughed sooo hard in my life. I literally burst out laughing and completely in tears. So did he.

I totally can relate to these 7 stages of not doing the dishes.  I currently live with 2 people, and sometimes I feel they literally go through these 7 stages until I decide to take charge by asking them extra nicely to take care of the business, like “Hey dude, I notice those cups have been sitting comfortably in the sink the past 72 hours.  Isn’t it the time for them to return where they belong?” or “Whoaa…what are these?  Dirty dishes, eh?  So when is your highness planning to do the dishes?”

As for myself, I never go through the 7 stages, only the first 4 – good thing nobody complains about it.