What do you want?  What does everybody want?  Money? Health? Better relationships?  Love?  In the end I think what we all want is happiness.  Are you happy?  How happy are you?  Can you be happier?  What will make you happier?

So how do we go about finding happiness and determine how happy we are?  That depends on what makes us happy.  For example, money to some people is very important, they maybe happy just seeing a big number in the bank statement and the security of having that money for emergencies makes them feel secure and happy.  To others money allows them to do what they love doing.  If you have money and love traveling, money allows you to not work and go see the world.  As another example, some people treasure vacation time more than money.  They would rather have four weeks of vacations a year rather than two and they are willing to be paid less for it.  Free time is what we all don’t have enough of.  When I was younger, I didn’t value free time too much, but since I have been traveling, I think about all the places I want to visit and new activities I want to do and people I want to meet along the way.  What I don’t have enough of really is time.  Often traveling is less expensive than one imagines.  There are many beautiful amazing places to see in the world.  Working and earning in the US or other first world countries allow us to leverage the differences between our economy and economies of countries we visit.  A school teacher earning 35,000 a year in the US can afford to Central America two months a year on a comfortable budget.  However most people in the US only have two weeks of vacations a year, so free time is what we lack and therefore is valuable.  So how do we use free time to make us happy?  For me, I love learning anything new.  You may love playing sports or sit around shooting the shits with friends or you may love playing poker.  When you have the free time to do what you want, you probably would be happier.

We can also compare and contrast happiness today and happiness in the future.  For example, some people work hard all their lives to save up money for a grand retirement.  They are not happy at their job, but they know when they retire, they can do everything they want to do with their money saved.  They sacrifice happiness today for happiness in the future.  People who work in investment banking often puting 80 to 100 hours a week to get ahead in their career.  Then they plan to retire by their mid-30’s with a few million dollars in the bank.  Again, it’s a choice of sacrificing happiness today for happiness in the future.  Which is better, being relatively happy everyday or not being happy for a few years and then have the freedom and happiness much later?

We need to know how and why each area of our lives affects our happiness, whether they be free time, love, money, health, relationship or whatever they maybe.  If we can say ” money gives me freedom to travel but I don’t need 50 million dollars today.  I only need at least $20,000 in my bank account to travel at leisure, then I’ll be happy.”  Or “Having free time makes me happy because learning to play piano gives me a lot of joy”.  “Family time makes me happy because I want to share my life with my loved ones” “Being in a great relationship makes me happy because it satisfies me emotionally and physically.”  “Having faith and being involved in my religion makes me happy because I can feel spiritually fulfilled.”

When we can define how and why each area of our lives contribute to our general happiness, we can then see what we are lacking and where we need to put our focus to make us happier.

Pretty much everything we want to or have wanted to do end up in one of two states — either you got what you wanted or you failed and then later on you say you learned something from your failure. For example, you could say I want to find a hot girl friend, or I want to become a millionaire, or I want to find a job that pays well, or I want to get promoted at my job this year, or I want to have better relationships with those around me, or more generally I want to become happier with my life. I have set many of these goals for myself before. While some of them have been successful by some work and chance, I admittedly have had many subpar performances.

In sports, athletes review their games and find ways to try to improve. By reviewing, correcting and practicing, they become more skilled and more competitive. However in the daily routine, how often do we actually review what we do and try to improve? For example, every night you go out to a bar and clubs to try meet girls, and often you have the same mixed results. As another example, you have tried to start a few businesses in the last few years, but have not taken a company far. Why? Often, I think we do the same thing over and over and expect different results. I did, and fortunately I realize it now. Some people instinctively and naturally get better at what they do after a few tries, but for the majority of us, I feel we can benefit much by taking a step back and look at our own actions. Fortunately we get feedback on some of our endeavors, and at least for these skills, we should know what to correct and how to improve. Other times, for example our jobs, we only get review maybe every half a year, so we do not have much time to figure out what we may be doing wrong.

We can consider a lot of our actions as skills in a particular area. For example, we talk to other people everyday. The acts of communicating and interacting with others are one’s social skills; like many other commonly recognized skills such as typing, one can improve one’s communications skills through conscious practice. As another example, I often go out dancing salsa. If I never stand in front of the mirror and practice my turns over and over, I am probably not going to get better at my turns. We can extend this idea to many of our behaviors. What do you want to do? How do you get better at doing what you want to do?

If you want to make more money, how do you make more money? Do you need more school? Do you need to be around people who have made boat loads of money? If you want to be meet more people, do you expect your same daily routine of going to work, dinner and sleep to produce different results? What do we need to change? Who do we need to surround ourselves with? These are important questions for those who want more.

Of course it’s hard to read about how to be successful from someone has not quote on quote “made it”, but I can tell you plenty about how to be unsuccessful. Some of these qualities come from my observations of others and many are from my own doing. Without further adue here is how you become unsuccessful. Hopefully by knowing many of the ways of becoming unsuccessful, you and I will one day write about how to become successful. The answer to all this has actually been said by a very successful Shelton Adelson already. Scroll to the bottom of this post if you can’t wait to find out.

1) Daydreaming (Not Guilty)

a. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one hundred million dollars? What would I do if I had that much money today? Think about the nice private jets and mansions I can buy for myself and my family and the flock of women who would follow me around and the vacation I can have on the beautiful coasts of the French Riviera, wherever that is. This type of dreaming is not too productive, but at least it’s entertaining to some degree.

b. The other type of daydreaming is the entrepreneurial daydreaming. For example, I have a great idea for a toy and I think I can make a gazillion dollars from it. Of course, I am only going to talk about it, but never do anything about it. But wait! Listen to my next idea, which is even better than the first one. I will still not invest any effort to find out if it’s even feasible, or if someone else has already done it, but I think it’s a great idea and I want you to take your precious time to listen to my idea. A lot of time is wasted in this type of daydreaming. If the idea is appealing enough, it wouldn’t be too far a stretch to invest some time to see how feasible it is. Bottom line, recognize what you want to do and decide to take actions. Then do it.

2) Underestimating the amount of work necessary to be successful (Guilty for sure)

a. Have you tried to work on a business idea on the side while having a full time job? You probably told yourself you can make the business work just by coming home and working for a few hours. Where is that business now? Looking back, what made it not work? How much time did you realistically need to put in to even have a shot at success? More generally, if you have failed at something, what did other people, who succeeded at it, do? If you consistently get only 85 on tests in a class, but this one kid in the same class always gets at least 90; how did he prepare differently than you did? As another example, if you want to lose that extra 20 pounds, but think that by walking 10 minutes a day, your weight will drop automatically.

b. The idea here is that if the end result is not important enough to us, we often underestimate the amount of work we need to put in to be successful at a task. If I was happy getting 85 on a test, I am not going to push myself to get an A. Same goes for starting a business. If my business doesn’t take off, I still have money coming in from my day job. Depending on our expectations, we put in the necessary amount of work to achieve that, but often times no more. Bottom line, need to know the amount of work you need to put in to get better at what you want to do. Invest time to research and add details to your plan. Then take that effort and multiply by two because someone else out there is working just as hard and as smart as you.

3) Not knowing if what you get out of it is worth the time and effort you put in (I am Guilty)

a. If you are getting paid minimum wage to sweep floor at a diner, would you work hard and try to get better at cleaning the floor? Probably not because you are getting little out of it. As another example, if you have a great idea for a business, but your business has a natural limit which doesn’t allow you to make more than your day job. Is it worth your time? Say you want to start a web design company. You could be the best graphic designers, but some skilled person in Romania would do the same job for 30% of what you are willing to get paid for. Is your web design company still worth your effort?

b. As another example, if you look at your boss and see that he has been at the same company for twenty years, still miserable. Do you want to stay at the same company and one day become like him? Or you might see that your boss is happy with his job and that he has advanced over the years, then your time at the company is worthwhile. When we are in a routine, these important questions often go unasked.

Looking back, I never really got much better at basketball while I was in high school. I did not make a conscious judgment of what areas I needed to improve and how to improve. When I caught the ball outside of the key, I knew how to drive to the basketball decently, but I was not a good finisher. While I knew how to post up, I couldn’t power up against a much bigger defender. Over the three years, I would play pickup games, but I never improved in areas of the game where I lacked skills. Unfortunately, these are some of the lessons one is supposed to learn through sports. Fortunately, I know them now. Oddly enough, I learned them through dancing salsa. Dancing was important to me and I wanted to get better, so I thought about what I needed to do to get better. I learned from different teachers, went out dancing often and realized areas where I was terrible at. Basketball was a fun sport for me, but never was important enough.

Entrepreneur and casino tycoon Shelton Adelson once said “It’s simply a matter of having a vision, coming up with a conviction and follow through on that conviction” “This is what entrepreneurs do.”
“You come up with a vision, and figure out what the upside and what the downside is.” I would add that make sure what you want to do is important to you because if it didn’t matter to you, you will probably come up short.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

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, its 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 retuned 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 its 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.