Utopia

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.

Source: Business Insider

You believe in the importance of your vision, but how do you get others to stop and listen to you? There will be many instances when you don’t have a lot of time to grab someone’s attention, be it a potential investor or a licensee. That’s why you need to be able to summarize the benefit of your business idea in a single, powerful sentence -- a sentence that is so direct and compelling, it stops whoever reads or hears it dead in their tracks. A good one-line benefit statement should make someone think: "I want to know more about that."

I’ve learned that if I craft just the right sentence, it’s all I need to get people to listen to my pitch, open my emails and answer my calls. I still remember the day the iPod launched and Steve Jobs called it “a thousand songs in your pocket.” Wow. That's captivating. He didn’t have to explain any further. We wanted it already! 

People don’t care about how something works.They want to know what it’s going to do for them.

Newspapers, tabloids, and these days, Twitter have been making use of the headline for years. How often do you find yourself on a webpage you never intended to visit, all because a headline was so tempting, you had to click on it? That should give you an idea of what I’m talking about. Creating excellent one-line benefit statements isn’t an easy skill, but it’s an important one, because it can be used to explain your idea in so many different kinds of situations in an attractive, successful way.

Sometimes, you only get one chance to make an impression. Cut through the clutter to make it count! Here three ways to create an awesome one-line benefit statement:

1. Make it emotional.
Why should people care about what you have to say? Grab them with something they can relate to. Benefits sell ideas, not facts. What is your idea going to do for the consumer or the world? Don’t be afraid to use emotion. People are motivated by their emotions more often than they are motivated by reason. Emotion also evokes visual imagery -- if people can begin to see your idea, that’s a good thing. Some emotional words include: "free", "incredible" and "unbelievable."

2. Keep it short.
Like -- really short. I’m talking no more than 10 to 12 words, ideally less. Remember, you don’t have much time. If your statement is too long, people may move on before they’ve even finished reading or hearing it. Don’t be intimidated by using fewer words. This is a really good exercise in general. Too often, I ask an inventor or entrepreneur to tell me about his or her idea and I’m overwhelmed with a five-minute speech. "What is he talking about again?" I find myself thinking. I’m not even sure. Brevity forces clarity.

3. Use numbers.
Numbers convey specificity. Look around you. Headlines with numbers dominate our world. One has only to look at Buzzfeed to understand the power of numbers.

Here are some examples of one-line benefit statements my students and I have used with great success in the past:

Try out potential statements on everyone you know. Which one has the greatest impact? Ask for feedback. Then, start using this line all over the place. When someone asks: “So what is it you’re working on again?” you will have a great answer!

Source: Stephen Key

For many entrepreneurs, the dream is to launch a kickass startup, grow it into a powerhouse and then sell it off or go public. In other words, to walk away with a boatload of cash in your bank account.

So what happened when a 23-year-old business owner was offered $3 billion for his company? He said no.

That's right. Not interested.

That young entrepreneur is Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and chief executive of messaging service Snapchat. The mega-offer he is said to have turned down came from Facebook.

We're not talking about cheeseburgers here. Three billion -- in cash. Who the heck turns down $3 billion?

Maybe Spiegel wasn't stoked about working for Mark Zuckerberg. Fair enough. Other reports indicate that Spiegel might be holding out for a better offer.

More than $3 billion? For Snapchat? If he's holding out, Spiegel is either crazy or crazy like a fox.

A press representative at Snapchat could not be immediately reached for comment. But we found this fairly detailed profile of Spiegel published last month by L.A. Weekly. Below are some of the more interesting details about the young man who just turned down billions of dollars for his startup (which, by the way, isn't generating any revenue but has raised $73 million from investors):

Source : Jason Fell

In this highly competitive marketplace, it's vital to keep your marketing campaigns fresh, new and on target. This fall, kick your marketing into high gear with this seven-point checklist.

1. Reestablish Listening Posts

Smart marketing relies entirely on understanding your customer. You need to know not only who they are and what they buy, but why they buy -- and why they choose to buy from you. Redouble your efforts at dialogue through social media, message boards and blogs. And get direct feedback from customers or clients, or via your front-line salespeople.

2. Announce Special Promotions

Use special incentives to draw customers to short-term promotions. This fall (much like the last), cost-conscious consumers are looking for good prices and great value, and promotions are a winner with most all economic groups. Coupons are increasingly vital, and there is a major rise in the desirability of online coupons.

3. Polish Lead Management

Over the summer, lead tracking and follow up may have become a bit haphazard. Be certain everyone who takes inbound calls asks every new lead where they heard about your company. Make the leads generated by your online, print and broadcast advertising trackable. And where possible follow up all leads within 24 hours. Today's sales are built on trusting relationships that grow from excellent customer service.

4. Focus On Fresh Ideas

Don't rely exclusively on a small team or just your marketing staff to produce fresh ideas. Make innovation everyone's responsibility this fall with brainstorming sessions, company retreats or by giving special recognition to individuals with the smartest suggestions. If your business has few employees, assemble a seasoned advisory board or form an online advisory group made up of members of your target audience to give input in exchange for sales perks.

5. Renew Retention Campaigns

Do you have regular e-mail or direct mail promotions that go out to your entire customer base? This fall, use e-mail to crank up your retention campaign by putting it on a consistent weekly or biweekly schedule. Soon you'll have discovered which incentives and messages work best to retain and upsell current customers and convert prospects, and yield the highest return on investment.

6. Enhance Your Giving

In this era of rising social responsibility, customers and prospects want to know you're a good corporate citizen, and this is a great time to align with a nonprofit. Businesses that rely on local customers benefit from helping community-based causes. You can provide pro bono services or undertake a promotional campaign to raise charitable funds. Just be sure to promote the undertaking via your website and the press. You'll provide help where it's needed most and earn appreciation from customers that leads to sales.

7. Freshen Your Content

When was the last time you updated the content of your website and your family of sales and marketing tools? Since your website is generally the first place prospects go to learn more about your business, it's crucial the site's appearance and themes are current. Imagine someone following a logical path from your website through each step in your sales process, and make sure all materials and messages they encounter flow seamlessly from one to the next. With more shoppers than ever browsing the Web this fall, it's a great way to jumpstart sales.


Source : Kim T. Gordon