Wednesday, August 23, 2006

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you."

Would that I could actually say the title of this post. Here's Steve Jobs in his commencement speech at Stanford:


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.


So as the past 7 days have made clear, I sort of suck at following my heart. It's like a familiar song; once you know it, you can recognize it played through a low-res supermarket speaker over the noise of a thousand screaming toddlers, but you need to know what to listen for first.

It's easy to have an inner voice when nobody else is trying to drown it out, but that ain't the case here. I need time without the background noise so I can hear my own wants clearly enough to actually follow them through the shouting.

MUST GET AWAYYYY

No. Must sit down and write out a long, well-reasoned letter to my parents on the frustrations that have been building up for the past... decade now, almost. Complete with illustrative diagrams and mathematical models, if applicable. Since I'm too much of a wimp to actually talk to them in person - or rather, too much of a wimp (or idiot) to stand my ground intelligently when I try and they begin to disagree with me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Baby steps, Mel, baby steps.

There's nothing wrong with building up to a final goal if you can't stomach it all at once.