You’d be free to try new things without feeling silly, unless - of course - you like feeling silly when you try new things.

Nothing that should be difficult would be easy, but nothing that should be easy would be difficult. Unless there’s still something to learn from it. Then it can be somewhat difficult.

In heaven, I don’t think there are any heating bills.

• “I love it here and everything is awesome”
• “Things here are cool, but here’s some sour points”
• “This place sucks”

When I’m the old-timer in a scenario like this, I tend to always fall into the second group of people. Why!?

It doesn’t seem to even matter how I actually feel. If I’m more honestly in the first or third category, I still pull myself into this category that has mastered the soft touch. I don’t know if this is because I’m putting myself in the new person’s shoes, because I’m reevaluating my own personal thinking, or something else.

In a job interview, if someone asks a question such as “what is the typical project life-cycle like around here?” — a very excellent question for an interviewing developer — I tend to answer at length rather than quickly. “Typically, the turnover is pretty quick. But some projects can run long because of client delays. It’s like this one project I’m on…. or this other one I’m working through…. or this one we had a couple months back…. yadda yadda….” At a time when I should be upselling and singing the praises of our lifecycle I tend to fall back into this reality-stricken middleground.

This is even true of when I’m the new guy, too. I always straddle this in-between spot of not getting my expectations up or holding back in my degree of excitement. This has been very noticeable in the past few months as I’ve met new people and explore new things in San Francisco.

I want to be cordial and friendly and interested, and I temper my highs and lows in order to do this. Maybe this makes me more accurate on the overall. Or maybe this just makes me boring.

That’s why it was fun to see this when I tried to park my cars a bit, just now:

It was maddening, to me, to not be able to move and shift fake cars around on fake streets run virtually by my real friends.

(All usage figures used below from Adonomics reports, April 2, 2008)

When a social networking application can become this addictive and enticing, it’s a seriously great score. It’s impressive. There have been studies that say an application — game or otherwise useful utility — has somewhere between 30 seconds and one minute to impress (or annoy!) the average Facebook user before they decide to uninstall the application. As most of these applications are attempting to leverage some sort of advertising angle, it’s a very make-or-break medium.

While I can’t confirm with numbers that A&E is seeing an uptick in website traffic or viewership for the television program the game is modeled after, I can confirm with numbers that the application itself is proving to be one of the most engaging and actively-used applications in the Facebook realm:

Over 90 thousand people use Parking Wars every day. That’s nearly one-third of all of the 300 thousand plus people that currently have it installed. Somehow, in this realm of shortened attention spans, the folks behind Parking Wars have found a way to get one in every three of their users to return every day!

That’s unheard of. Well, not entirely. Let me give you an idea of how Parking Wars compares to some of the other top applications on Facebook: it ranks #64 in daily engagement (that one-third of people come back every day makes for a very high ranking) and is #498 in total installed user base.

While being barely in the top 500 might seem unimpressive, you should realize that being #498 out of #21,848 is a big feat. It’s right above “Are You A Bitch,” right behind “Which Hollywood Superstar Are You?” and interestingly close to an application my company has developed - Smarty Pants (which sits at #518 with 285,000 total users, 8,550 of which come back every day).

As companies, advertising agencies, and marketing folk attempt to get a handle on how powerful social networking can be, they should observe applications like Parking Wars. There’s interesting pulls that keep users checking daily, whether it be defending themselves from ticket-happy friends, attempting to get the most money for their actions (it’s all virtual dollars, sadly), or just going in a punishing their friends for parking a black car in a yellow cars only zone.

 If Parking Wars doesn’t quite end up driving viewership to their television programming, it at least will go a great distance toward improving their brand image and introducing the A&E brand to the younger demographic available of Facebook. Perhaps in the near future they can find even better ways to pull people like me out of their daily routine to check a social networking application every so often. Good work if they manage it!

You can do whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be fancy or perfect. It just has to be comfortable.

Looking back through some old photos of my fabulous friend Leslie’s, I realized I’ve catalogued thoughts like this, before. Case in point: Rockin’ 305. From early 2006:

And my comment below it:

Dancin’ it up in 305 with a hotdog in my mouth and friends by my side. A duplication of times like this would be a contender on my list of “things that occur with regularity in heaven.”

I still believe what I said. And looking through those pictures gave me serious pangs of homesickness.

Now this is not groundbreaking stuff. I’m probably somewhere between the fourteenth and four-hundred-thousandth person to think this one up, but here’s how I went about it.

Cheesy Hot Dog Scramble

Ingredients

• 2 Hot Dogs
• 4 to Six Eggs
• Shredded Monterey Jack Cheese
• Fresh Ground Pepper
• 1/2 Tbsp Butter

Preparation

1. Cut the hot dogs into small pieces (as you would for a wee tot) while sizzling the butter to a melt in a frying pan.
2. Fry up the hot dog bits on the frying pan, flipping them often enough to prevent burning
3. While frying up the hot dog bits, whisk four eggs with ground pepper and shredded cheese in a small bowl
4. Remove the hot dogs from the frying pan, leaving the resulting grease in the pan.
5. Pour the whisked eggs, pepper, and cheese into the pan and prepare as scrambled
6. When the eggs have coagulated enough, add the hot dog bits and mix all together.

Serves two. Delicious on a toasted sandwich or by its lonesome!

Now, enough time hasn’t elapsed where I’d be able to make sweeping statements of “west coast attitude vs. east coast attitude” or anything remotely similar. That’s not something one can qualify in this short period of time. So much goes into making quality statements like that. Is it a city versus suburbs difference? Is it a California versus New Jersey difference? Is it a hipster versus sub-metro difference? Is it something else? Is it just the ridiculous differences in weather, perhaps!?

What I have learned from my time in this city is that there are many friendly people willing to meet a new face, chat with them, show them around, and have a good time with them. I’ve met a decently large amount of people in my short time out here, largely in part to the welcoming ways ways of my new housemates and co-workers. Whether or not the welcoming attitude is a personality trait inherent to these fine people or inherent to the region from which they come is something I can’t determine. Let’s say it’s the people.

If you have an open mind and are willing to break — at least a bit — from any shell you might be in, moving to a city can be an invigorating experience. I still find myself being a bit hesitant to “jump in” in certain respects, but far less so than I thought I’d be. I’ve tried new things, changed my eating habits, learned and successfully navigated multiple types of public transportation, gone to several parties and outings, and done some exploring.

Sure, I’m still wrapped up in a personal cocoon a bit, but it’s nothing major.  It’s important to me to maintain my sense of self while learning, experiencing, and taking new aspects for that self. As long as I’m doing things because I truly want to attempt them or learn about them and not because I feel a social pretext or need to, I will be happy with myself. And, thankfully, there are tons of ways to do that in this new locale.

Work is so far very good. I enjoy the company of my colleagues and feel we are doing well meeting each other. The job is fun and exciting and entails work with technologies I am excited about daily. It is thrilling to work for a variety of clients and brands in the span of a week and to have my work be touched by end users thousands of times over. That I get to balance significant amounts of technical and creative skills in my work is something I’m very glad about.

Home is becoming more so in rapid chunks of time. It’s difficult to be engaging and full of energy each day after work, but the relationships I’m building with housemates and friends are already becoming rewarding and fun. I am comfortable and much sooner than I’d anticipated. The tiny barriers that exist are all from my own personal end and are sure to be down before long. That, and, getting furniture in my room would go a great distance to making me physically “set.”

Missing home is pretty much as I’d anticipated: it sucks. So many people back home have been very curious about the move and also understanding of any less-than-reasonable time it’s taken me to get back to them while I get settled. Don’t let anyone convince you that a three-hour time difference is no big deal — it is significant. Phone calls, emails, online chats, and any form of communication take on a different timing and sometimes have to juggle two independent contexts that can be so very frustrating. It’s really limiting and confining in a lot of respects, but I am finding adequate (not great, but adequate) ways around the limitations.

So, in summation: so far, so good. San Francisco has proven itself to be a beautiful, friendly, and fun place to live. Work is fun and challenging at the same time. People are thus far wonderful and welcoming.

I sometimes feel like I’m still on the way, but in reality I’m already here.

I want to show you how much I love you
If it’s the only thing I ever do
If it’s what you needed to see it
I’d rip my heart out and serve it to you

Because life’s too short to be living in doubt
Whatever it takes to believe me is what I need now
So just tell me make me force me show me how
I can make you see

I can see it in your eyes
Like every time’s a surprise
I tell you that I need you
You consider it all lies

It’s the truth and that I know
So drop the caution and let’s just go
Believe me when I tell you truth
The thing I love most is you

If you want my heart on a platter
I’ll bring it to you  with a knife and spoon
Just on the hope you’ll believe me
More than once in a blue moon

Whatever you want me to do
Whatever you need me to say
Whatever it takes to convince you
I can make you see

Naturally, there’d be some differentiation between chorus, verses, and breaks. I don’t think my notes every got that far. It was really interesting to find this. And pretty exciting to tear up the paper it was written on.

This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Stanford Commencement 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 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 patents 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 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 your 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 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.

While it’s a bit round-a-bout, it’s a pretty great story about how new beginnings often become nicely-tied-up endings… or middles, as it were.