STEVE JOBS: Learn from Your Failures--Stay Hungry...Stay Foolish

         From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14       4142    15512         1151        189       712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

          25       2414    10578        1582        119      144

Mar     2        1989      9490       1726       110      194

          31       1115      12301        3950       458       58

April   6         906     11787         4211        631       37

May    4         853     13667         3025     3786      59 

         26         607     12348         2399     3842     101

June    1         287     10637        2346      3205      95

          30        249      8505        2127        991      383

July     7          251      8440         1595        817      411

          13          307      8117         1613        623      633

          14          374       8721        1574        580      453

          20          256      8283        1425       489      596    

         20          256      8283        1425        489      596 

         21           414       8638        1388        510      516

        

Summary:  Well, the USA is back to where we were in May regarding new deaths/day.  I did not see this coming, but it now appears that a compelling reason has suddenly appeared to convince those no-vaccine skeptics to change their minds.  Get vaccinated or worry about dying.

From the New York Times this morning, the life expectancy in the U.S. significantly dropped:

Of course, much of the blame goes to COVID-19, but it's more than that.  Health causes of death are actually decreasing, meaning, getting better.  Racial inequality is one reason for a lowering of our expected lifetime comparing 2019 with 2020:

From 2019 to 2020, Hispanic people experienced the greatest drop in life expectancy — three years — and Black Americans saw a decrease of 2.9 years. White Americans experienced the smallest decline, of 1.2 years.

Hispanic and Black Americans were disproportionately represented among frontline workers.  Plus, this is the duo, with Republicans, that is refusing to be vaccinated.  All this means a continual longevity decline for those groups.

At the CNN town hall with President Joe Biden yesterday, he said that it will take the FDA until the Fall to fully approve those COVID-19 vaccines, a similar time frame for the vaccination of those under 12 years old.  On the other hand, most receent reports seem to place this latter approval into the winter.

The mega-bills meandering through Congress hit a bump yesterday, as Republicans prevented progress on the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.  However, this is just a charade, for the legislation is safe enough for those up for re-election next year, and should pass next week.  There is concern about how the trillion dollars will be paid.  But not to fear, for there is that other $3.5 trillion Democrats-only infrastructure package where anything standing in the way will just be excised and lumped into this larger catch-all, which is more for dream social projects desired by the Bernie Sanders faction than infrastructure, and will be snuck through using reconciliation, a magic doorway that surely looks illegal, but is not.  If you're fuzzy about budget reconciliation, read my posting of 6April2021.  You would think no one would be interested in this totally boring subject, but funny, it regularly hits my top ten for the week.

About the Tokyo Summer Olympics, did you know:

• Tokyo was supposed to host the 1940 Olympics, four years after Hitler's 1936 extravaganza?
• However World War II got in the way.
• Finally, the Summer Olympics came to Tokyo in 1964, the FIRST in Asia, ever.
• That was the starting point for Japan becoming a world power.
• 
  Watch a trimmed down 2-hour version of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  If you can find it, the full Tokyo Olympiad by Kon Ichikawa was almost 3 hours long, and could well have been the greatest sports film in history.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave it a 100 rating.
• Events already began two days ago, so finally, you can view the opening ceremonies at 6:55AM EDT Friday morning.  
• The full program will end at 11AM.  The actual ceremony will be replayed Friday night at 7:30PM EDT.
• More than a billion watched the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.  Could well be equaled by Tokyo.

• 
  There is something especially emotional about the Opening Ceremonies.
• The brand new stadium has 68,000 seats, but only 10,000 diplomatic representatives will be in the audience to greet the 11,000 or so athletes.

Finally, the topic of the day:  Steve Jobs.  I was yesterday sent this commencement address (click to watch his presentation) to the graduating Stanford class of 2005.  My first thought was, wow, this can only be too, too boring.  Amazingly enough, I was mesmerized by his "stay foolish, stay hungry" speech, for that message about overcoming failure has been the driving mechanism throughout my life.  Some excerpts:

• 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.
• 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....
• 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.  None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 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.
• 
  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 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.  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 .
• 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 world’s 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. Don’t lose faith.  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.

He goes on to report on his cancer diagnosis, but underscored:  Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.  He passed away six years later.

Some of the above began to sound familiar, so I checked my archives, and a decade ago said:

How many of you remember your graduation commencement speaker?  Mine at Stanford in 1962 was Edward Land, founder of Poloroid.  He was really famous then, but, I quote from his talk:

If we take, however, the view which I am suggesting, namely that the role of education is not to teach people how to think creatively but rather to acquaint them as fully as possible with the totality of the past, then the potential of the educational system becomes much higher  It seems" possible that if this role was accepted honestly then our schools might address themselves to this task with vigor and effectiveness.

In that same posting, I said:

Forty three years later, Steve Jobs addressed the Class of 2005 at Stanford and told them to learn from failure.  Almost everything important I've accomplished came through first dealing with failure. There is something to this attitude, for many just give up.  You must read Job's commencement address, or click on his 15 minute statement:

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

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

In short, without realizing it, I repeated the same posting.  The message, though, is crystal clear.  I would not be what I am today if I did not experience major failures in the life.  I'm all the better now because these failures led to my successes.  And I was indeed foolish and hungry through it all.

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