N.B.

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 other's 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.

-- Steve Jobs, commencement address at Stanford University, June 12, 2005.

Comments

[DarkoV]

Fabulous outtake. Coming from Jobs, it makes the statement even more effective. I'd always presumed he'd be with us forever and ever. Death was one thing I thought he didn't spend too much brain power on. Thanks for posting this.

[patricia]

Oh, I do like that, very much.

Thanks for posting it.

[stephenesque]

I trust that you are not dead, since you haven't updated this thing in a few days.
If you are dead, however, please contact me at www.ouija-board.org.ie

[Sarsparilla]

A friend of mine told me in a brief aside at a concert on Saturday of his HIV positive status, newly diagnosed. "I'm okay with it," he said, "now. It's taken a few years from my life expectancy. So I've resigned from my job and taken up freelance photography instead. No, really, I'm all right."

I related this interaction to my mother, who's just finished her first six month course of chemotherapy. She recognised exactly the syndrome; pointed out that it's a good thing we don't all constantly experience such hubris. If we all truly thought we might die next week, who would run our sewage farms? Who would sweep the streets?

But there must be a balance. Live today, or assume you'll live forever tomorrow. The two are exceedingly different lifestyles.

[andrew]

I wonder if society will be filled by more and more revelations & mental amblings of this sort as the ambitious sucessful boomers all continue to age, and some of them, to die.. its worth following the link and reading jobs full college commencement adress, and the important thing about this that the quote snip leaves out, is that for about 15 hours, jobs thought he had a rare form of cancer that is pretty much a 3 month long death sentence..

and it turned out, for jobs, that experience was almost a gift that became this and other insights, cause it did not turn out to be that death sentencce..