News Clippings 2011.10.13

 1.      Steve Jobs, In Memoriam

    Our tribute to a boundary-breaking thinker and endlessly astute businessman

    Bloomberg BusinessWeek   October 6, 2011

 

Doug Menuez (1986)

Steve Jobs was born in 1955, into an era of rotary phones and room-size computers. He died on Oct. 5, 2011, having put a computer inside a phone and that phone into 120 million pockets.

Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, and while he went to characteristic lengths to control public knowledge about the details of his condition, he could not hide his physical deterioration. First he underwent surgery and took a leave of absence. When he returned as chief executive officer, he guided Apple through a streak of new products that proved his belief that art and commerce, complicated ideas and simple packages, could be merged into a universal aesthetic. Each launch brought more magic, more acclaim, more profits—and less Jobs. There was a second leave of absence in 2009, and pictures of the CEO introducing iPhones and iPads over the last three years show a man disappearing before our eyes. He died at home, surrounded by his family, the day after Apple introduced the latest version of the iPhone without him.

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Everything just got simpler. That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. ---May 25, 1998, Business Week

Clippings from Steve Job’s Commence Address to Stanford University graduates

June 12, 2005

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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.  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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

2.      Wall Street protests mix with anti-war demonstrators   CNN    Oct. 07, 2011

New York (CNN) -- A mix of protesters gathered again Friday in cities across the country, decrying a loosely defined list of financial problems and mixing in places with others marking the 10-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. Demonstrators in New York and Washington appeared to congregate over both the Afghan conflict, arguably America's longest war, and in protest against the widening disparities between rich and poor and corporate greed, among other grievances. New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said an investigation is under way after protesters claimed officers used excessive force when corralling demonstrators earlier this week. He also noted that demonstrations had cost tax payers $1.9 million in overtime costs for the city's law enforcement. CNN affiliate stations also broadcast images of crowds that gathered in Austin, Texas, as well as Minneapolis, Minnesota; Seattle, Washington and Atlanta, Georgia. The activity came a day after President Barack Obama discussed the growing movement, saying demonstrators "are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works."

3.      Michael Jackson called hiring me 'divine guidance,' Murray says

CNN    2011-10-07  

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Michael Jackson begged for his "milk," his nickname for propofol, after a sleepless night and just hours before he died from what the coroner said was an overdose of the surgical anesthetic, the singer's doctor Conrad Murray told detectives.

"I've got to sleep, Dr. Conrad," Murray said Jackson pleaded to him. "I have these rehearsals to perform. I must be ready for the show in England. Tomorrow, I will have to cancel my performance, because you know I cannot function if I don't get to sleep."

Jurors in Murray's involuntary manslaughter trial heard about half of the two-hour police interview on Friday, before going home for a three-day weekend.