Steve Jobs told students: ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’

By  Valerie Strauss

Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder being called the Thomas Edison of his time, revealed in a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 why he dropped out of college — and why he thought it was one of the best things he ever did. Yet he had other advice for the students.

Jobs, whose death at the age of 56 was announced Wednesday night, started that speech by telling about being adopted as a baby, and why, 17 years later, he attended Reed College  in Oregon for only six months before dropping out. He said:

 

“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 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 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 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 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 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.”

 

At the end of the speech, his advice to the students went like this:

 

“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.”

John Wooden on True Success

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_wooden_on_the_difference_between_winning_and_success.html

 

With profound simplicity, Coach John Wooden redefines success and
urges us all to pursue the best in ourselves. In this inspiring talk he shares
the advice he gave his players at UCLA, quotes poetry and remembers his father’s
wisdom.

Dallas Cowboys

Cowboys Chronicles Foreword

November 15, 2010

By DANNY WHITE

You love ’em. You hate ’em. But you’ve got to admit, you talk about them. They are the Dallas Cowboys, arguably the most successful franchise in the history of the National Football League. Unarguably, the most talked-about franchise. When any conversation hits one of those awkward lulls, just bring up the Cowboys. Because everyone, it seems, has an opinion.

As one who was lucky enough to play my entire career with that blue star on the side of my helmet at a position that gave me a unique and privileged view of the inner workings of the Cowboy Machine, I am honored to be a part of this book.

The Cowboy Machine was – and still is – one that is constantly changing. Change is constant, from owners to coaches to players to cheerleaders to front-office folks and stadiums. The only thing that doesn’t change is the history. It’s irrefutable, built on games and facts and feats. That’s what this book is all about. No hype. No pretenses. Just facts.

I’ve always said that the value of playing quarterback for the Cowboys cannot be measured in dollars. It’s the most visible position for the most visible team in sports. The lessons I learned during those years were invaluable. Most were not learned anonymously, but with millions of eye witnesses. NFL football is live television. Anyone who ever played quarterback at that level will tell you that there were many times when they would have given anything for a “take two,” a “do-over,” a “second chance.” But that’s one of the things that makes football great. There are no “do-overs. ” As a result, the pressure to perform at a high level is extreme. That pressure can bring out the best and the worst in people. It is a valuable study in human behavior.

I benefited from one of the greatest teachers in the game and one of the greatest examples of how to be a professional on and off the field. Roger Staubach was a consummate professional on the field, just as he is in the business world and as a husband and father. I learned a lot just by watching him. Tom Landry was an extraordinary teacher. He was a master of football, but he also taught of life. One of the many famous quotes attributed to the great Vince Lombardi holds that, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Tom Landry was a Lombardi disciple, but he didn’t believe that. He believed that there were far more important things than winning or football. His faith in God and love for his wife, Alicia, and their family came first. Faith, Family, Football. Those were his priorities.

As a coach, he was unsurpassed. One of his teachings was about timing as a quarterback. He would say over and over again that, as the decision-maker on the field, knowing when to do something was more important than knowing what to do or why to do it. I disagreed with him. I believed that if you knew why you did something, then you automatically knew when to do it, making why the most important of the three. I argued with him about it for years.

Then, one fateful day in Texas Stadium, we were playing a big game against the Redskins (actually, every game against the Redskins was a big game). Leading by four, I called an audible on fourth-and-3 from midfield with a minute to go. Coach had told me to try to get them to jump offsides with a hard snap count. If they didn’t jump offsides, we were to let the play clock run out, take a five-yard, delay-of-game penalty, punt the ball and let our defense win the game for us. However, I saw what I thought was an easy play to get the first down to clinch the game. So I audibled, “GREEN 36, GREEN 36.” I’ll never forget it. The defense stuffed the play. The Redskins took the ball, went down and scored and we lost the game.

I told Coach Landry after the game to watch the film and that he would agree that he would have done the same thing I did. The headline in the Dallas Morning News the next day read, “NO DANNY NO!” I didn’t know they could print letters that big! I sat in the coach’s office after watching the film the next day, waiting for him. “Well, coach, ” I said after he walked in. “You saw it. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing I did?” I was red-faced and angry. He was calm and unruffled. He replied, “Dan, you’re right. It was the perfect play to run against that defense. But I would not have done what you did, because I know that the most important thing in a football game is not what you do or why you do it. It’s when you do it.”
His point was that even though that play had a 90-percent chance of success, as a quarterback, you don’t take that 10-percent chance of failure with the game on the line in the final minute. It was a valuable lesson learned…the hard way. Then, as I was leaving his office, he stopped me and said, “Dan, don’t ever change the way you play football.” He realized how badly I felt, and also knew that there were a lot of times when that mentality had won games for us. Unfortunately, those didn’t always make the front page of the Dallas Morning News, because they don’t write stories about planes that land safely. He knew that one of the greatest causes of failure is a fear of failure and embarrassment, and he didn’t want to destroy my confidence.

In classic Coach Landry fashion, he took me from being as low as I had ever been as a player and built me back up. TWO lessons learned. Someone once asked me if the stoic Tom Landry ever smiled. I answered, “I don’t know, I only played for him for 13 years.” That’s an exaggeration because he really did have a sense of humor, just a very dry one. But I will tell you something he really never did. In 13 years, I never heard him raise his voice. Think about that. It’s an absolutely amazing statement to make about any coach at any level. He didn’t need to. His players respected him so much that all he had to do was look at you and roll his eyes (Roger called it the “Brook Trout Look”), and it was worse than running a million laps, paying a million-dollar fine or getting yelled at.

Those memories, those relationships, those lessons…they are the real value of my career, and they come flooding back to me as I read this book. It’s a book every Cowboy fan – heck, every football fan, sports fan or anyone related to a sports fan – should have proudly displayed on the living room coffee table, or at least in the library or under the bed (that’s you, Redskin fans).

Just imagine: Your sister and her husband are over for dinner. After the dishes have been cleared, it begins…the obnoxious bragging from your brother-in-law, who claims to know everything that ever happened in any game ever played by the Cowboys, As the words “Do you remember when Roger threw that pass to Drew in…,” his voice fades as you slowly get up and walk to the shelf. You return to the table, set it down and slide it across the table to him.

The next sound you hear is unmistakable: silence. It says it all. You have produced the most powerful know-it-all-brother-in-law-silencer ever invented for a situation like this: Cowboys Chronicles. The Truth. The Bible. “In the beginning was Clint Murchison. And he hired Tom Landry.”

As his lower jaw slowly rejoins his upper, you turn his tears of embarrassment into tears of joy as you say, “That copy is yours.” Euphoria. And victory. Nothing your brother-in-law can do for the rest of his life will top this. He owes you…forever.

So, here it is. Cowboys Chronicles. Do you want to know what happened in the very first game the Cowboys ever played? Or what happened the first time Landry played revolving quarterbacks with Staubach and Morton, or what happened in Tony Dorsett’s first NFL game, it’s in here. Care to delve into what went wrong during the most forgettable year in Cowboy history, 1989? Want to relive Troy Aikman’s rise from the depths of his rookie year to the pinnacle of the game – a rise unequaled in NFL history? It’s all in here, along with hundreds of other true stories and photos that comprise the great history of the Dallas Cowboys.

No Hollywood drama, No hearsay. Just facts.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

 

Don’t just dream the dream… walk the walk and come join Danny White with Global Team 11! This is your chance to create your own legacy… What are you waiting for? www.globalteam11.com