Su-Lav!e

蠢动

noreply@blogspirit.com (SueR) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:44:46 +0200

不安分，又不安分！

不安分的时候会害怕：
怕的不是浪费时间，而是没有时间可以浪费！

想哭的我

noreply@blogspirit.com (SueR) — Mon, 6 Aug 2007 16:05:57 +0200

心情大衰！倒霉的是一个接一个来！
难道是我错了？一路走来从未看见一点希望，我真的怕了。
怕再无法坚持了！

脆弱大爆发的时候又到了，好像，每一年都会爆发。
我知道这样子很不乖，但这一秒，真的好想。

好想好想，在你的怀里，大哭一场。

Do we learn the most from people whose views we share?

noreply@blogspirit.com (SueR) — Sun, 5 Aug 2007 17:45:00 +0200

We can usually learn much more from people whose views we share than from people whose views contradict our own; disagreement can cause stress and inhibit learning.

From whom we can learn more, people whose views we share or people whose views contradict ours? In the author's statement, the former group of persons prevails. Because the author pointed out that disagreement can cause stress and therefore inhibit learning. Nevertheless, whether disagreement will inhibit learning or on the contrary stimulate learning depends.

The point that disagreement cause stress and inhibit learning works for some times. A person have reason to lose faith in front of a disagreement and thus stop chasing the value of his or her own. The author's statement makes sense in this way. But as for which one is much more valuable for our learning, we can not draw a conclusion easily and hastily.

Looking back to our childhood, how much we had learned from our best friends who always did things in the same way as we did. At least, this was the case for me. When I was a little girl, I had a very close friend. We did almost everything together and shared views of doing those things. We were having lunch together, playing dolls together, watching television together and doing homework together. We looks like a couple of twin sisters and looking backwards, I really had learned a lot from her. She is smart and hard-working, and full of characters I admire. I believe it is much common for people, especially for children, that we can get self-acknowledgement from those whose views we share. Therefore, we can be encouraged in learning and growing in the way be precious. This encouragement will as a result help people to become more confident in learning knowledge.

On the other hand, disagreement, which may bring more bad than good to children in growing, can also do good in learning. For the moment that one's idea has not been accepted and even challenged by the others, the best way to prove the oneself must be raising more evidence and provide more persuasive demonstrations. On the way of achieving this, one have to study more. Disagreement therefore can help to take another perspective, which is quite the opposite, to think about the argument. No doubtfully it makes some good. Even if eventually the contradiction turns out to be wrong, the process rewards the most. Disagreement is therefore also valuable in learning. Yes, it causes stress. Yet, it stimulates learning instead of inhibits learning by arousing an air of competition.

However, when trying to be persuasive and take those views contradict into consideration, we are possible to meet difficulty and have no idea what will be the best way to achieve that goal. In the case, to whom can we turn for help? I think this situation is quite the same we have talked about in the first part: we need acknowledgement and we need someone to be on our side. Take a close look at the modern society, nobody is achieving a goal on his or her own. We need a team to battle. Moreover, within a team, we have collaboration and competition. We work with our team members who share the same objective. We learn from each other as well as from the competitors.

Therefore, people whose views we share and people whose views contradict our own is like the two faces of a coin, both of which have its own effect to present a treasure. However, it has more to do with the attitude we look at them. We can give up as well as get motivated under the stress and pressure given by disagreement.

Word Count 590

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

noreply@blogspirit.com (SueR) — Sun, 5 Aug 2007 09:54:31 +0200

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, its 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 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 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.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

noreply@blogspirit.com (SueR) — Sun, 5 Aug 2007 09:41:34 +0200

Lincoln-Douglas Debates, series of seven formal meetings during the Illinois senatorial campaign of 1858, in which Republican Abraham Lincoln argued the issue of slavery with the Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas.

Douglas, known for his ability as an orator, was running for a third term as United States senator from Illinois. He opened his campaign for reelection with a speech in Chicago on July 9; Lincoln replied on the following evening. Douglas made another major address in Springfield on the afternoon of July 17; Lincoln answered him that night. Thus the pattern of the debates was established.

On July 24 Lincoln issued a formal challenge. “Will it be agreeable to you,” he wrote to Douglas, “to make an arrangement for you and myself to divide time, and address the same audiences during the present canvass?” With some reluctance, since he was the better-known candidate, Douglas accepted, and the terms were agreed upon.

Illinois had nine congressional districts, and both men had already spoken in two. Therefore, seven joint meetings were specified: at Ottawa on August 21, Freeport on August 27, Jonesboro on September 15, Charleston on September 18, Galesburg on October 7, Quincy on October 13, and Alton on October 15. Douglas would open the first debate with a speech of an hour's duration, and Lincoln would have an hour and a half for a reply. Then Douglas would close with a half-hour rejoinder. The pattern would be followed in all seven debates, with the candidates alternating in giving the opening speech.

Although many issues confronted the nation, Lincoln and Douglas discussed only the extension of slavery into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Both men took as their points of departure the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Douglas had pushed through Congress in 1854, and the U.S. Supreme Court Dred Scott decision of 1857. Under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, slavery could enter U.S. territories north of latitude 36°30' (from which it had previously been excluded) only if the inhabitants wanted it. The Dred Scott decision, on the other hand, held that a master could take slaves into free territory and keep them there as slaves. This decision, by implication, nullified the popular sovereignty provision of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Lincoln took the broad ground that the fathers of the Republic had looked upon slavery as an evil and had wanted to place it in the course of “ultimate extinction.” Douglas refused to be concerned with the moral aspect of the institution, holding “popular sovereignty” to be the determining principle. At Freeport, Lincoln sought to emphasize the discrepancy between popular sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision. Douglas escaped from the dilemma by asserting that in spite of the Supreme Court’s decisions, slavery could exist only where it was supported by friendly local legislation.

Since senators in 1858 were elected by joint ballot of the state legislatures, Lincoln and Douglas were really campaigning for the election of state senators and representatives of their respective parties. Had the popular vote been decisive, Lincoln would probably have won. The Republican candidate for the statewide office of state treasurer polled 125,430 votes; the Douglas Democratic candidate, 121,609. The splinter Democratic factional candidate supported by President James Buchanan's followers polled 5071 votes. But the state's apportionment was not up-to-date, and half of the state senators had been elected in 1856 when the Republican Party commanded much less strength than it did two years later. As a result, when the legislature met on January 6, 1859, Douglas was reelected by a vote of 54 to 46.

For Lincoln, the defeat was not a significant political setback. The debates were widely publicized and provided him with national recognition, making possible his nomination for president in 1860 and his subsequent election.