Welcome to Ganesh’s Fortnightly E-Zine
Issue 01,
Jan 02’ 2006
Dear
Readers,
Let me wish
you and your family a very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2006.
I am
excited to write this first e-zine for you. With the
launch of our website www.geocities.com/gg_biz
in Sep 2005, there had been a growing traffic to our website and encouraging
feedback. This has motivated us to start this e-zine,
which will reach you on alternate Mondays.
Writing,
Public speaking and Mentoring are my passion and I derive happiness by helping
others progress in their life. This is my Goal in starting this e-zine. The e-zine shall be
formatted as ABCD…as below
Enjoy
Best
Wishes
Ganesh
P.S: You
are most welcome to forward this e-zine to your friends,
relatives and colleagues. Thanks in advance for forwarding the same.
P.S.S: Get
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In this issue…
1. Analyzer:
New Year Goals
Millions
of people all around the world will be planning to start this New Year with some
serious Goals. If you too have started thinking about your Goals for this year
2006, then this is for you…
The
excitement of the New Year is quite contagious, as it sets in our mind a tingle
of excitement giving a different orientation to our mind, our thinking, our
habits, our plans, etc. How long does this excitement going to last? May be it would last for few days from now.
This is a real good time for us to do some introspection, learn from our past
mistakes, making resolutions, forming new habits, etc. The ideal time would be
to do it in isolation, with a pen and a dairy. Please do not procrastinate by
waiting for your 2006 dairy to start this work.
Though
Time is transient and our life is a journey on the road to our destiny, every
New Year comes as a check post, where we stop for a while to check ourselves,
our vehicle, refuel the engine, energize ourselves, etc to restart the journey.
I am reminded of one quote by Nelson De Mille,
"We
are all pilgrims on the same journey... but some pilgrims have better roadmaps."
It
is true that people who succeed more often are those with better roadmaps.
Writing down your Goals is a key thing before you start your 2006 journey.
Even
though every New year most of the people take resolutions and some serious
goals, over the time they drift away, loose focus and interest, because they do
not follow up themselves. This involves discipline and commitment to one’s
self.
“Discipline
is the bridge between our Goals and Accomplishments”. I love this quote by
Jim Rohn. So powerful it conveys reality. Discipline and consistent focus alone
can transform your Goals into Accomplishments. Also consistent reviewing of
your Goals on a weekly or monthly basis will help you to remain focused in your
actions.
What
does success really mean to you? For some it is personal development, for some
it is professional development and it means different things for different
people. An ideal success would mean an overall growth in all facets of life –
Personal, Health, Family, Professional, Spiritual & Social. I had created a
Goals Manual-Spreadsheet (Ms Excel file) which I did last year for my self and
I found it to be a very effective tool. Now, I would like to share this with
you. If you are keen to make use of it, please mail me at [email protected], I shall email the
attachment immediately.
“If
you want to achieve your Goals, the secret is to make a public commitment, so
forceful that you cannot turn back from it “says Anthony Robins in his book
“Unlimited Power”
I
wish you my sincere wishes to accomplish your goals.
By
Ganesh
2. Booster: Motivation
stories
Have
you ever heard of a person who was thrown out from the company that he had
started - APPLE? An inspiring
speech delivered on 12 June 2005.
He
says… “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…”
“Your time is
limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't let the noise of
other's opinions drown out your own inner voice”…
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
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:
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 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 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
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.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs
3. Catchy
Quotes
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what
you do are in harmony.“ Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)- Indian
ascetic & nationalist leader
“ The secret to
creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
Albert
Einstein (1879 - 1955)- Noble Prize Winner
Indira Gandhi (1917 - 1984)- Former Indian
Prime Minister
4. Did You
Know?
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