live each day one day at a time

I Don´t want to think ahead. too much possibilities makes me freeze.

Hmmm, just lost over $500! I made a mistake in registering to sub this school year and put down that I was NOT available until 2008. Way to go!

No wonder my phone was silent. Oh well, no use crying over spilt milk. Still…

I am strongly considering getting a roommate! Yuck! I hate having to exercise that option. At least I’m lucky enough to have a space to offer.

I answered two ads today from people looking for places.

My deal is that I have not worked in one month, since taking the bar. August is a hard month to find a job because so many people go away.

I probably will end up substitute teaching next week. The money is pretty good but it takes 30-60 days to get paid!

I had a great interview last week but have heard nothing from them.

Things are in flux…again…as usual. I spend so much time being frustrated…

This is a crisis moment. I actually had a great few days. I went to visit family. It was very relaxing…no email or computer.

But when I got back, my reality hit me. I just estimated my monthly bills for the fall. Huge! I really don’t know what is going to happen.

Even if I substitute teach, which I loathe, it takes two months to get paid.

Part of me wants to just “let go.” Ummm, what does that mean? It would be really hard to not look for opportunities…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the message from Steve Jobs (below) where he says that we need to do what we love and everything else will follow.

For me personally, I try to live by principles in the Bible. I don’t see anything like that in the Bible. To the contrary, what I did come across the other day is a passage from 2 Corinthians 5:15. It says that Christ died so that those who receive a new life in Christ will NO LONGER LIVE TO PLEASE THEMSELVES. Instead they will live to please Christ.

This is the opposite of “doing what you live.”

I am not an authority on the Bible and still somewhat new to Christianity. I have been asking people what they think about the two statements. I’ve gotten some interesting comments.

Some say that it is appropriate to use the talents God gave us because we’re passionate about them because He wants us to use them. Others feel like God wants us to use those talents for the Kingdom.

If you have an opinion, I would love to read it!

I’m still battling a malaise that has been ever present for two weeks or more.

I just can’t get satisfied with things the way that they are.

I read the Bible, go to church, pray, plan, execute…wait… There is just an almost audible lull in activity surrounding me.

The more irons I throw on the fire, the louder the lull is.

All I can do is keep doing what I’m doing and keep being productive.

August is a God-awful month. It just stinks. Year after year after year. September is the same or not much better.

I have a few things I’m working on. Trying to resurrect my relationship w/ _ (writing gig). Even though I wasn’t getting paid, the exposure was good. They published one review two weeks ago but I haven’t heard from the editor about the other one I turned in on Monday. I hope they’re not too pissed b/c it was late… It’s hard when you’re not getting paid. I spend 50% of my time looking for money making ventures or actually working.

I got an assignment from ____ to interview a designer. Of course my imagination launched into a thousand possibilities…

Things were going so well all of May, June and July. Even when I try to “hunker down” and “skip” August, the sentiment of August catches up to me. It’s like a curse…

Someone sent me the Steve Jobs commencement message. I almost deleted it w/o reading but something said to give it a look.

I’m glad I did. It’s really inspiring. He is a man truly blessed.

I’m struggling with the “do what you love” thing right now. I told myself I would give myself some time to dedicate to doing what I love, which is digital illustration. I came into a little bit of money and have been using that to live off of but I did not want to use it all up!

Now it’s a matter of taking care of some serious responsibilities immediately. I get distracted and go after whatever I feel will bring in dough. This same pattern is happening now.

I really don’t know what to do. I’m doing what I love. And…and what? I guess the key is having faith. Or maybe faith is not really the issue…

It would be tremendously helpful if I suppressed my frustration. I would love to be optimistic and light-hearted. It’s not in my nature. I feel super impatient.

Whatever. All the talking or writing in the world is not going to change today.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, delivered a
truly inspirational commencement address to some 5,000 Stanford University
graduates. Without further adieu, his message:

“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.

Fired From Apple

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 world’s 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.

Diagnosed With Cancer

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 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.

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 1960s, 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.”

This goal is kind of hard right now. It’s that time again, August sliding into Sept. This time last year and also in Jan., I promised myself I would take some classes at SVA. But, I ended up working at one of these hideous temp jobs that demand so much of my attention…or I freelanced on a film.

Now, one year later, I MUST increase my skills. I’m blessed that I have recently discovered a bunch of great books. I got one on Illustrator and one on Flash. Still, there are some great classes at SVA and I need to go ahead and take them. I also just signed up for a really comprehensive one day class of InDesign. That should help a lot.

Anyway, what to do about work/money? For right now, I have to think ahead.

My agency called yesterday and told me that the client is letting me go because their work load is decreasing. That’s a nice way of saying don’t come back.

It’s all good. In fact, it’s fantastic because I get to study fulltime one week earlier than expected. I’m definitely looking at this as a gift from God based on His divine plan for me.

Of course the down side is that I’ll have much less income than I expected…income that I was planning on.

Normally, I would be in tears and completely panicked. I just feel euphoric. I hate working 9-5 and to tell the truth, that job was a little creepy. (Hopefully more about that later)

Looking at the silver cloud, I think this will allow me to actually work at my part-time jobs MORE because I can ease up on my study schedule in general.

Anyway, re: this goal, there are two sides of the coin. One is, which I’ve done, you live your life one day at a time because you’re too distraught and overwhelmed to do any long-term planning whatsoever.

Or, two, you just take things as they come.

Someone played Sinatra’s song for me, “That’s Life.” It’s so true. Life is a series of hills and valleys…you just have to keep walking.