A year after he was first diagnosed with cancer, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs made an inspiring speech to Stanford University graduates. Here are jmy favorite and most important quotes from this speech with my annotations in bold:

“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.” Here Jobs means that you should follow your heart and do what you really love, even though you may not see now how this will help you in your future career.

“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.”

“‘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.” I’ve started applying Jobs’ technique recently. One unexpected result was that I spend less time searching for opportunities that would make me money in the short run, and I find myself spending more time working on my dream.

“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.”

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” By “hungry” he means eager, passionate, zealous, always wanting more and more and never satisfied or contented. Foolishness is associated with youth. Being young, you are free from the burden of having to make safe choices.

Watch the full speech:

Full Prepared Text of Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

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.

Nick D’Aloisio is a programming whiz kid from London UK, only 17-year-old and still in high school. A few days ago he sold his news-reading app, Summly to Yahoo for allegedly $30 million. Nick created the software for his app over the last two years. The app, created with mobile devices in mind, summarizes long text into summaries and snippets in a similar way humans do. D’Aloisio also got a job at Yahoo’s London offices, where he will work on incorporating Summly’s algorithm in Yahoo’s various mobile applications. D’Aloisio gave an interview to Charlie Rose yesterday—watch it here.

Here’s the beginning of the interview:

What is Summly, and how did you come to create it?

Summly is a technology I’ve been developing for about the last two years, and what it does is it automatically condenses and summarizes long-form text into summaries and snippets. When you’re on a phone—you’re rushed for time, you’re busy—you just have to look down and see the gist of something. So Summly provides this medium where you can skim and get an idea of what’s happening. Over the last three, four years, I’d been teaching myself to program and was very fortunate to have worked with the Stanford Research Institute over a period in 2012 to develop this algorithm, and that’s what Yahoo’s (YHOO) buying.

You’re self-taught?

Well I’m still in the process of kind of self-teaching. I always had a fascination for technology and design, and so when I was 12, the App Store was announced, and this is a true story, I went into an Apple (AAPL) Store a few days later and was like, “I want to learn how to program.” The people at the store said, “We don’t even know what a program language is.” So I was a bit disheartened, and I spent six months waiting for the App Store. And when it went public, there were enough resources online to teach myself the basic level of programming. I released my first app that summer, and it was one of the first 3,000 apps on the App Store.

Photo by @Kmeron

Nomadic people, hunter-gatherers in the place where is now the village Willendorf in Austria created this small statue about 25000 years ago. The archaeologists who found the statue called it the Venus of Willendorf. The Venus, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, is now in the Museum of Natural History of Vienna—the museum’s most prized possession worth $60 million.

Yes, both her age and her estimated price are staggering. But more interesting is a fact about Venice I learned in the BBC documentary How Art Made The World : The Venice is one of the first unrealistic images of the human body. Her bottom, hips, breasts, stomach, and sexual organ are greatly exaggerated while her head has no face and arms. To us, the Venus is ugly, but according to experts featured in the documentary, “the brains of the artists hunter-gatherers were preprogrammed to exaggerate what mattered most.” The gatherers were living in a harsh environment so features such as fat around the waist were desirable.

The Venus of Willendorf is indeed a great way to start learning about the origins and meaning of art.

Images courtesy of Captmondo on Wikimedia Commons.

I wanted to create a cartoon that looked like a ridiculous Valentine’s Day Sale ad sent as a newsletter from an e-commerce company. What’s more absurd than promoting the sale of firearms on the day of romantic love?

Mobile commerce has been growing steadily for the past few years; it’s in fact a shift in consumer behavior. The mobile device is now central control system for anything. Donahoe says that when he said that mobile will dominate, people didn’t believe him. Thanks to Donahoe, eBay is reaping the benefits now that mobile commerce is taking off. Some 8,000 cars are sold per week on eBay by users on mobile devices.

Donahoe mentioned that the total offline retail last year was 10 trillion dollars and that during half of those transactions the consumer accessed the Web via a mobile device at some point—researched something about a purchase, like price, product reviews or anything.

He made it clear that eBay and Amazon are not competitors. Amazon is a retailer, eBay is a commerce and payments platform helping other retailers. Ebay will never compete with retailers using its platform—it wants to make money through them. Watch the video:

Apparently several years ago someone found that Pope Benedict XVI and the Star Wars fictional character Palpatine look very much alike.

Yes, I’m not kidding, neither does the Brutally Honest Panda. They saw that she sucked at singing the national anthem (and it’s not the lip singing, plane mediocre). At the Super Bawl…the Panda says it all.

This BBC documentary called “The Party’s Over: How the West Went Bust” was produced in December 2011 and has two parts (watch them below). My favorite parts from this documentary:

• Real-life stories of Chinese and British middle class and working class people—how their lives and earnings compare.
• China’s economic miracle—how it started.
• How the West increased economic growth by increasing consumption by borrowing  more and more money.
• How money was flowing not to the big investment opportunities in the East (to the developing countries) but to those who consumed, to finance those who were already in debt with cheaper and cheaper credit.
• How the Chinese people save money (half a salary) while people in the West (Britain and US) save nothing.
• Highly-skilled people in Greece working for no money.
• How Greek people lived for 30 years on borrowed money—they borrowed, lived well, and now they are the “extreme version of the Western nightmare.”
• Young British girl, a university graduate with a degree in psychology and post-graduate credits works as a sales clerk in a super market—a job she could do as well without an expensive 4-year university degree.
• The United States and Britain can learn about manufacturing from Germany—small German manufacturers, family-owned companies, produce “highly-specialized, highly-engineered goods in high-tech industries” and employ about 80 percent of German workers.
• “Germany sells the things that China wants to buy, such as high-technology, especially high-end capital goods.”
• China is poring money in higher education now. They are now producing 20 times as many engineers than Britain.
• In Britain, the financial sector sucked up all the best minds—engineers were regarded as schmucks. It’s time to encourage those who actually make something.

Photo: Robert Scoble

We’ve been going to Vegas for the past 7 years but it was last year that we finally found a good late-night meal—the best late-night meal in Las Vegas. The place is called Sirrico’s Pizza in New York – New York Hotel & Casino. It’s easy to find—just go inside the casino and head toward the Greenwich Village—the restaurants and bars in the casino. I recommend the deep-dish pepperoni pizza. You only need a slice to get full, plus they have a deal—$7 for a slice of pizza and a beer. And it’s not just my wife and I that love it. We’ve taken all our friends to have a slice there and everyone agrees that the pizza is delicious.

I shot this video one hour after Christmas day 2012—the whole experience of going to eat at Sirrico’s Pizza, from entering the casino from the parking garage to entering the pizza place and ordering.

Wife and I went to Vegas for the holidays and passed the World’s Largest Gift Shop on our way to Downtown Las Vegas. I wanted to show the store to our friend who had never seen it. We took this photo of the sign that read “World’s LA Gest Gift Shop.” To tell you the truth, the missing-letter sign isn’t far from the truth—most Vegas visitors come from California anyway.