Thanks to my friend Margabandhu for sharing this motivating story

+++++++++++++++

Once there was a king who received a gift of two magnificent falcons from Arabia.

They were peregrine falcons, the most beautiful birds he had ever seen. He gave the precious birds to his head falconer to be trained.Months passed and one day the head falconer informed the king that though one of the falcons was flying majestically, soaring high in the sky, the other bird had not moved from its branch since the day it had arrived.

The king summoned healers and sorcerers from all the land to tend to the falcon, but no one could make the bird fly. He presented the task to the member of his court, but the next day, the king saw through the palace window that the bird had still not moved from its perch.

Having tried everything else, the king thought to himself, “May be I need someone more familiar with the countryside to understand the nature of this problem.” So he cried out to his court, “Go and get a farmer.”In the morning, the king was thrilled to see the falcon soaring high above the palace gardens.

He said to his court, “Bring me the doer of this miracle.”The court quickly located the farmer, who came and stood before the king.

The king asked him, “How did you make the falcon fly?”
With his head bowed, the farmer said to the king, “It was very easy, your highness. I simply cut the branch where the bird was sitting.”

We are all made to fly– to realize our incredible potential as human beings. But instead of doing that, we sit on our branches, clinging to the things that are familiar to us.

The possibilities are endless, but for most of us, they remain undiscovered. We conform to the familiar, the comfortable and the mundane. So for the most part, our lives are mediocre instead of exciting, thrilling and fulfilling.

So let us learn to destroy the branch of fear we cling to and free ourselves to the glory of flight!!! Make it a great life!!

+++++++++++++++

In the new year, make a resolution to shrug the fear off and take that measured risky step! We take risk all the time in our life, unconsciously.

It is those people who take risk consciously that succeed even more!

Wish you a very happy new year!

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Steve Jobs - We miss you

5 October 2011, millions of fans around the world were shaken by the expected but very sudden and hated demise of Apple founder Steve Jobs to a rare form of cancer that he battled for almost seven years. He lived to hear about the launch of an iPhone 4 variation, but God took him away before the world could see the next big leap in smart phones.

World will surely miss his innovations.

Here I am, paying tribute to the legend, whom I would like to remember as the Michael Jackson of technology world, by publishing one of his very famous speech.

Over to Mr. Jobs!

********
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 belie
ve 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 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 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.

********

Mr. Jobs! we will stay hungry for more Jobs like persons in this world!

We thank you very much for all the great things you gave to us!

RIP

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Baba Ramdev is occupying every pixel of the news channels, especially, Times Now and CNN-IBN for the past few days. Baba Ramdev has been crusading against corruption for quite some time now and he is now probably capping it all with this fast unto death.

Saviors for India

The general public, frustrated with corruption in the day-to-day life, respond well whenever someone raises the voice above the din to make the Government care a bit for the people. If Anna Hazare focused on the Lok Pal bill to make it see the light of the day from nearly 40 years of politically influenced jaildom, Baba Ramdev is taking the next step forward by asking the Government to bring back the black money stashed outside the country.

Baba Ramdev made a fiery speech today at the Ramleela grounds which was covered in the television channels. The full transcript of his speech can be accessed here

I loved this part from his speech in which Baba Ramdev likens corruption to Ravan.

“02233081122 is the number. When I asked people to show their support for the campaign through miss calls, more than 55 lakh miss calls have already been registered and by tomorrow, more than 1 crore miss calls will be registered. We have already made a world record. These miss calls will help to further awaken the masses. “This is not a yogya leela but a rashtra leela. Ram leela ke maidan mein, bhrashtachar ke raavan ka vaddh hoha.”

It is truly going to be a Ram(dev)leela against Ravan from tomorrow onwards. Hope his crusade meets with success breaking the iron doors of political illwill.

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இந்த நாட்டு ஓட்டர்களில் சரி பாதி, பெண்கள் ஆவர். அவர்களிலே 100-க்கு 95-பேர்கள் தற்குறிகள். இவர்களுக்கு யாருக்கு ஓட்டுப் போடுகின்றோம் என்பது தெரியாது. யாருக்கு ஓட்டு என்றால், மரத்துக்கு, மாட்டுக்கு, குதிரைக்கு, பூவுக்கு, வெங்காயத்துக்கு என்று இப்படித்தான் கூறுவார்களே தவிர, இன்னாருக்கு ஓட்டுப் போடுகின்றேன், அவர் இப்படிப்பட்டவர், அவர் கொடிவழி பட்டியல் இன்னது என்று தெரியாது. – பெரியார் (நன்றி: தமிழச்சி, ஃபேஸ்புக்)

பார்வைக்கு பெண்ணினத்தை மட்டமாக சொன்னது போல தோன்றும் பெரியாரின் கூற்று, 100க்கு 95 சதவீதம் என்கிற விகிதாசாரத்தை தவிர்த்து, அவர் சொன்ன காலக்கட்டத்தில் மட்டுமல்ல, இன்றும் சரியாகவே இருக்கிறது.

நம் இன்றைய தலைவர்கள் பெரியாரின் சிந்தனையை நன்றாகத்தான் புரிந்து வைத்திருக்கிறார்கள்.

அதனால் தான், தொலைக்காட்சி, மிக்சி, கிரைண்டர், மின் விசிறி என்று பெண்களை வசீகரித்து, மாட்டுக்கும், குதிரைக்கும், இலைக்கும், முரசுக்கும், (வெறும்) கைக்கும், சூரியனுக்கும் சுலபமாக ஓட்டு வாங்குகிறார்கள்.

சந்தேகமிருந்தால் யாருக்கு ஓட்டுப் போட போகிறீர்கள் என்று கேட்டு பாருங்கள்.

பாரம்பரியமாக எங்கள் வீட்டில் சூரியஇலை என்று கை தாமரை காட்டுவார்கள்.

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Watch the video below.

It is an advertisement clip.

The thought is novel.

Though it conveys superlatives of the product, I found it very interesting from the perspective of motivation.  To me this advertisement conveys the th0ught that any obstacle, adversity can be turned into an advantage.  Three cheers to the creator!

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