Sport:LeBron James made the Cavs watch this inspirational Steve Jobs speech before Game 3
The Cleveland Cavaliers were in trouble.
The defending Golden State Warriors had crushed them in the first two games of the NBA Finals, winning game 2 by a humiliating 33 points.
Now, the Cavs were about to play at home for the first time in the series, and LeBron James wasn't having it, according to a report by ESPN.
He gathered the team in the locker room beforehand. And then he turned to what might seem an unusual source of inspiration: Apple founder Steve Jobs.
James played a portion of the speech Jobs delivered to the Stanford University graduating class of 2005.
It's an amazing speech, and you can watch or read the whole thing below. But the part James played was about "connecting the dots." The advice was do a lot of things that you're interested in even if they don't make sense at the time, carry the lessons you learn forward, and combine them to become a greater person in all parts of your life.
It worked.
According to the report, the Cavs' Richard Jefferson listened to the speech and reflected on how he was only in the Finals because he decided not to sign with the Dallas Mavericks over the off-season, even though the Mavs offered him more money. Kevin Love had been reading up on Jobs separately, and had recently ordered a t-shirt with the famous line from Jobs' speech: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
The Cavs dominated the Warriors in Game 3, before losing again in game 4. Then, the team made history by winning the last 3 games - the first time in NBA history a team has won the Finals after being down 3-1 - and delivered the city of Cleveland its first major sports championship since 1964.
"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 sinceWindows 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."
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