Tag: death

Personal Growth

Steve Jobs’ excellent and iconic speech

by MQDuongLeave a Comment on Steve Jobs’ excellent and iconic speech

I came across this speech from Steve Jobs and it’s absolutely amazing. It’s 20 minutes long and I urge you to have a listen. It’ll be worth your time and below are the reasons why I love it

  • When he returned to Apple, the company was weeks away from bankruptcy. Imagine one of the top 3 valuable companies right now, the Apple today, came so close to being bankrupt. That’s how dire the situation was. Steve talked about how he overhauled the entire product line, cutting it down from many to just four. It’s an example of Essentialism that I talked about. By focusing on the most important products, Apple not only avoided making consumers confused, but also directed resources to make sure those products were great, supply chain was great and marketing was great
  • Steve Jobs said that marketing is about values and who we are. I absolutely agree. People need to know who you are before they agree on any business transactions with you. At the end of the day, if they don’t know who you are, they unlikely will trust you. Without trust, can there be sustained relationships?

To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world. And we’re not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us. Now, Apple, fortunately, is one of the half a dozen best brands in the world, right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony. It is one of the greats of the greats. Not just in this country, but all around the globe. Even a great brand needs investments and caring if it’s gonna retain its relevance and vitality. Apple brand has clearly suffer from neglect in this area in the last few years and we need to bring it back.

Source: Steve Jobs’ speech
  • The way he talked to the audience was so easy to understand. There was no jargon. There were no big words. Even if you don’t have much business background, you’ll still be able to follow him and what he was saying. It shows that he both understands really well his message and knows how to convey it. Plus, his casual outfit made the atmosphere friendly, relaxing and light; which I think helps his delivery. On a personal note, I have tried really hard on this blog to keep it simple. First of all, I don’t think I have the vocabulary to be a sophisticated writer, as a non-native speaker. Second of all, I want to be a good communicator like Steve. I still have a long way to go, but I don’t plan to change the current approach
  • The latter part of this clip features three best points from his commencement speech in Stanford in 2005. The first point is about how we need to have faith in something and how we can only connect the dots in our life looking backwards. The second point is to continuously look for what we love to do. The last point is about the importance of death in making life decisions. It again goes back to Essentialism that I mentioned early. We need to figure out what’s essential in life and have the courage to take actions.

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. 

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.

Transcript from The Guardian

Book

Book: When breath becomes air

by MQDuongLeave a Comment on Book: When breath becomes air

I came across this book thanks to suggestions on this Twitter thread. So a shoutout to those who recommended it.

The book is a memoir penned by a dying young neurosurgeon named Paul Kalanithi. Paul was diagnosed with a lung cancer when he was on his way to earn a doctorship. He staged an inspiring battle against cancer while continuing to do what gave his life meaning. In the end, he passed away roughly two years after the first diagnosis and shortly after his daughter was born.

His life, his focus on his calling and the bond between him and his wife were inspiring to read. Though it left me in a downbeat mood for the obvious reason, I was glad that I picked up the book and through the words of the Kalanithi, went on a journey with them and learned from them.

I recalled listening to Steve Jobs saying that death reminded us how we were all going to die and it put everything we do into perspective. We only have one shot at life and need to make it count, no matter what it means to each of us. Reading the book plummeted me into realization and somewhat fear that life was too short. One moment, Paul was a marathon runner, a hotshot neurosugeon in California with a great family and a splendid career awaiting. The next moment, he found himself in a losing battle with death and powerless in his final days to the point that even eating was a torture.

Similar to all other book-related posts, below is the list of some of my favorite passages. I highly recommend you give this book a chance.

Only later would I realize that our trip had added a new dimension to my understanding of the fact that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break

Source: when breath becomes air

I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning.

Source: when breath becomes air

Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

Source: when breath becomes air

If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?

Source: when breath becomes air

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed

Source: when breath becomes air

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

Source: when breath becomes air

I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it. Paul is gone, and I miss him acutely nearly every moment, but I somehow feel I’m still taking part in the life we created together.

Source: when breath becomes air

No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur

Source: when breath becomes air
life, Optimism, Personal Growth

Naval Ravikant’s take on death

by MQDuong1 Comment on Naval Ravikant’s take on death

Naval Ravikant is one of those people that I love to listen to. He is the CEO of Angelist and a deep thinker with remarkable insights. Below is one of the most significant lessons I learned from him. All credit is to Naval and Tim Ferriss for interviewing him.

I think a lot of the struggle we have in life comes from a deep, deep fear of death. It can take form in many ways. One can be that we want to write the great American novel. We want to achieve something in this world. We want to build something. We want to build a great piece of technology, or we want to start an amazing business, or we want to run for office and make a difference. A lot of this comes from this fear that we’re going to die, so we have to build something that lasts beyond us.

Obviously, the obsession that parents have with their children. A lot of that is warranted biological love, but some of that is also the quest for immortality. Even some of the beliefs of some of the more outlandish parts of religion I think fall into that. I don’t have the quest for immortality anymore. I think I came to this fundamental conclusion. I thought about it a lot. The universe has been around for a long time, and the universe is a very, very large place. If you’ll study even the smallest bit of science, for all practical purposes we are nothing. We are ameba. We are bacteria to the universe. We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse. This universe has been around probably for 10 billion years or more, and will be around for tens of billions of years afterwards. Your existence, my existence is just infinitesimal. It’s like a firefly blinking once in the night.

We’re not really here that long, and we don’t really matter that much. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually, you will fade. Your works will fade. Your children will fade. Your thoughts will fade. These planets will fade. This sun will fade. It will all be gone. There are entire civilizations which we remember now with one or two words. Sumerian. Mayan. Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No. I think we’re just here for an extremely short period of time. From here, you can choose to believe in an afterlife or not. If you really do believe in an afterlife, then that should give you comfort and make you realize that maybe everything that goes on in this life is not that consequential. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, you should also come to a similar conclusion. You should realize that this is such a short and precious life that it’s really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There’s no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or so that the universe is going to be around. Whatever your natural state is, it’s probably not this. This is your living state. Your dead state is true over a much longer time frame. When I think about the world that way, I realize it’s just kind of a game.

Which is not to say that you go to a dark place, and you start acting unethically and immorally. Quite the contrary, you realize just how precious life is and how it’s important to make sure that you enjoy yourself, you sleep well at night, you’re a good moral person, you’re generally happy, you take care of other people, you help out, but you can’t take it too seriously. You can’t get hung up over it. You can’t make yourself miserable and unhappy over it. You just have a very short period of time here on this earth. Nothing you do is going to matter that much in the long run. Don’t take yourself so seriously. That just kind of helps make everything else work.

I felt fortunate to come across this one and a half years ago. It was instrumental to the change in my perspective in life and a lot of what I do. Hopefully, you’ll find something of value from him.