You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Steve Jobs, rest in peace.

Full Speech Transcript :- http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

My favorite parts:

• ‎ ‎”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.”
• ‎”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.”

  11 minutes ago ·
• ‎”…he 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.”

I’m really terribly sad to lose this guy who was a hero to me since I was 9 years old.  In elementry school when I got my first Mac SE, I was a full on nerd, and me and my friends totally wanted to be Steve Jobs.

Like to the point that people who asked me, as a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up I said “Steve Jobs.”  He was so cool and inspiring.  We were blown away by his mandate to not make anything unless it was “Amazingly Great” .

I was shocked and heartbroken as an 11 year old when he was ousted from Apple.  And then I thought the NeXT was the coolest computer in history and that it would change the world, and I was shocked and heartbroken again when it failed.  Then it was what, 10 or 15 years before he hit with Pixar?  And then another 5 years before Apple purchased NeXT OS and used it as the foundationfor Mac OS X and the iPod OS and iPhone OS.  It’s a pretty amazing comeback story.  And I love comeback stories.  I love comeback stories way more than “everything was always awesome” stories.

I don’t know why I totally needed to blog about this today, but I do.  I don’t have any direct tie-ins to fitness.

It’s also crazy because I’ve been writing my new book for six months, and every weekend I look at it and ask myself if it’s “Amazingly Great”, if it’s as simple and as beautiful as an iPod.  Essentially, I ask myself if it’s something Steve Jobs would be proud of, if he was in fitness.  I don’t know if I succeeded.  But I know it’s better, and I’m a better person for having tried.  I know that little bits of his philosophy gleaned from interviews and articles over the decades have transformed what it is for me to create.  For all people everywhere that are artists or designers or writers or painters or engineers, Steve Jobs has raised the bar on creating things .

It’s true we’ve lost one of the great innovators of our time.  But what I really miss is the Steve Jobs in the above video.  He made stuff that made the whole world cooler, and he did it because it was what he loved to do.  It’s the most inspiring thing ever.