Do not look forward to the changes of life in fear;

rather look to them with full hope as they arise,

God will deliver you from out of them.

He has kept you hitherto,

do you but hold fast to His dear hand,

and He will lead you safely through all things;

and, when you cannot stand,

He will bear you in his arms.

Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow;

the same everlasting Father who cares for you today

will take care of you then and everyday.

Either He will shield you from suffering,

or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it.

Be at peace, and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations.

Last night, my sister showed me this prayer and I've been obsessed with it ever since. Currently, my family is going through a very scary, difficult time. Last week, my dad had a stem cell transplant, which involves high dose chemo that wipes out his entire immune system. In order to keep him alive, they infuse him with his healthy stem cells. This process of revitalizing his immune system takes time, so he is currently at extreme risk of infection, and now has to spend 7-10 days in the hospital. He sleeps all day, needs help walking, can hardly eat, and has become increasingly irritable. 

This current situation has obviously left each member of my family struggling through it and constantly searching for strength to continue through their day. Personally, it has been really hard for me to be away at school and have to go to my classes, do homework, etc. as if nothing is out of the ordinary. A lot of the time, I feel like a zombie and completely out of it, as my thoughts are solely centered around my dad and how he's doing. All I want to do is be at home with my family, not sitting in the library studying Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Reading this prayer has left me feeling that maybe I CAN get through this. That maybe I really do have enough strength to keep living my life while all of this is going on. God is there for me even when I feel completely alone, guiding me towards peace, hope, and faith. The most I can do is accept Him with open arms, even when it seems easier to reject Him and just dwell on the worst. Also, this prayer made me think about all of the gifts God has given me to help me overcome this dark time. Specifically, God has given me the absolute best friends at Notre Dame. They have left me feeling completely overwhelmed with love and support countless times, and they go above and beyond to make sure I know that they are thinking of me and praying for me. I feel so lucky and blessed to have them in my life, and I don't know where I would be without them. I see God working through each one of them every day.

I copy/pasted this prayer on a "sticky note" on my laptop desktop. Now, every morning and whenever I feel down, I will read this prayer and remember that God is with me and will guide me through this journey.

“That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time.... God is forcing us on, or up, to a higher level: putting us into situations where we will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than we ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us”

Recently, my dad received some bad news about his cancer. In the past week, he has had to undergo many tests and scans, which has proved to be very difficult because of his short term memory loss and other health issues. Everything has taken twice as long as it needs to be and we have to constantly repeat what is going on and remind him of the unfortunate status of his cancer. During times like this, it's so so easy to dwell on how unfair everything is and how my dad and my family have done nothing to deserve any of these hard times. It doesn't make any sense and there is no way to fix it or make it go away, and so it feels justified to become angry with God for allowing any of it to happen. 

I came across the quote above during a philosophy class this past semester. I love it because it acknowledges that we have no idea why bad things happen to the best people. Although we can't understand why we have to go through personal obstacles, God vows to never leave us alone and we must remain confident that we will only become stronger, better people on the other side. Recently, this quote has given me a lot of strength because it reminds me that I have more love and patience than I sometimes feel I have. Inevitably, I will still have my moments of frustration, sadness, and anger, but this quote helps me move away from that unhealthy place and towards a place of acceptance. Especially when we go through obstacles and tragedies, it's almost impossible to fully accept that God has a plan for each of us that we won't ever completely understand. However, I find comfort in knowing that God will help me as much as I let Him and that these trying times are providing opportunities to become the best person I can be.

It’s amazing to think that I started this blog almost exactly four years ago.  When I first made the blog, I remember feeling desperate to relate to someone else about all the feelings and emotions I had been enduring.  My dad had just been diagnosed with cancer one year before, and had lost his short-term memory three years before that.  Although at the time, his cancer had made it into remission, I still struggled with accepting all of the obstacles my dad and my family had gone through.  His short-term memory loss especially affected me, as I was constantly reminded of the difficult reality with his repetitive questions and altogether different personality.

First and foremost, I’m proud of my seventeen-year-old self for dealing with these feelings in such a healthy way.  Instead of internalizing my emotions and isolating myself from others, I took my struggles as an opportunity to potentially help others who are also going through various obstacles.  The main goal of this blog continues to be to relate to others in any way that I can.  If a simple sentence or quote strikes someone and lessens his/her pain in any way, I’ve accomplished what I’ve sought out to do.  It means the world to when people have reached out and have told me that their blog inspired them and motivated them to keep going.  The ability to connect with someone in this way affects everyone involved and makes the world feel that much less overbearing.

Although so much has remained the same, I have also grown so much in the past four years.  I have learned so much about myself, and have learned how to truly love and value myself.  Four years ago, I undermined my emotions and thought that being strong meant not feeling sad or overwhelmed.  I wanted to avoid these feelings, and I would get angry with myself when I felt upset.  Now, I accept and embrace these feelings. I realize that these moments of emotion make me human.  Instead of making me weak, they make me strong because I am able to overcome them and remain determined to live a happy, full life.

Life is life and horrible, unfair, scary things happen to the best of people.  Letting this fact dominate your mentality will only cause you to be miserable.  If nobody can change the inevitability of death and suffering, why not learn to liv the best life possible while you can!? Your mortality can serve to motivate you instead of burden you.  Nobody’s perfect, and some days, life will get the best of you.  Simply stepping out every day with the intention to remain peaceful and happy is enough to truly live to your full potential.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

I was recently looking through old pictures on my phone and came across this screenshot.  At the time, I screenshotted it because my mom's message really struck me.  At the time of this conversation (last fall), my dad had just found out that his cancer came back, and that he had very large tumors on his chest. Because of his short term memory loss, it took him a while to ingrain the knowledge that he had cancer into his memory. This time was extremely scary for my entire family. None of us had any idea of what the future would bring for my dad. For me, everything seemed to be falling apart and I had no way to control any of it. Being away from home was overwhelming and stressful, especially because I had to keep up with school even though I was constantly thinking and worrying about my dad. Scary, negative thoughts were always going through my head, and I was always preparing myself for the worst. When I got these texts from my mom, though, I began to see it all from a different light. I couldn't control my dad's cancer or what would happen to him, but instead of using all my energy worrying and being pessimistic, I could spend my time remaining hopeful by praying and going to the grotto alone or with my friends.

I hope to one day have the strength and the trust in God that my dad naturally has each day. Despite all of the horrible things he has gone through, his faith never falters. Instead, he remains confident that God will continue to be by his side, and my family's side, and that everything will be okay. Some days, it takes a lot of extra effort to maintain this mentality because all you want to do is yell at God and feel defeated. However, I hope to use my dad as a constant example to live my life like him every day regardless of the difficult, troubling events that may be occurring around me. 

strength isn't how much you can handle before you break; it's about how much you can handle after you break.

My dad had his brain surgery in 2006 in Indianapolis, as that's where the best doctors were. Indianapolis is about three hours away from my house in Chicago, so my brother, sister, and I were only able to visit him once for about three days. We came about two weeks after his surgery. Leading up to this visit, he had been predominantly unresponsive and was in intensive care. We would communicate with him simply by talking loudly on the phone to him while our mom pressed it up to his ear. We would say things like "I miss you" and "I love you", hoping that some part of him could maybe hear us.

When we got to the hospital, I had no idea what to expect. The first time we got to see him, he was awake and responsive. It was good to see him alive, but he was far from himself. He was asking us about a plane crash that he confusedly thought in and was making no sense. Tubes were all over the place and his entire head was bandaged. This visit was very short, as I ran out of the room in tears about two minutes into it. For the rest of the trip, most of it was filled with sitting with him while he rested. He slept so much at this time, and it was always a very deep sleep where not many people could wake him. The nurses would actually slap him or hit him to wake him up if they needed to. 

I was only 13 when all this was going on, so it's amazing to look back now and reflect on aspects that I didn't pick up on or dwell on. During the entire time in the hospital, I fought to hold back tears, hoping that I could keep it together and appear strong for the sake of my younger siblings. I think to an extent that's what everyone was doing, including my grandma and aunt who came with us on the trip. Nobody knew how to act or what to say- each minute was taken at a time because nobody truly knew what was going to happen to him. Was he always going to be like this? Was he ever going to be able to function alone? Would he always be so confused that even when he was clearly in the hospital, he thought he was in Florida on vacation with the family?

This may seem very strange, but as I think about it all now, the power of faith and God shines through this entire experience. I'm not saying any sort of miracle occurred, because he still has no short term memory and was affected drastically. However, even when he had no idea where he was, how old he was, etc., he still had an immense, ever present faith in God at his foundation. Often when he was in those deep trances of sleep, he would tightly grasp his rosary the whole time.  If you looked closely at his hands, you could see that he was ever so subtly moving the beads with his fingers, indicating that he was saying the rosary in his head.  

There's a chance this could have been a subconscious movement, but I now see this as a sign from God and from Mary.  Even when my family was seemingly falling apart and the leader of the family was becoming dependent on his 13 year old daughter, God and Mary were with us, guiding us through this difficult time, giving us hope.  It also shows my dad's tremendous strength and inner-peace.  Instead of being scared and acting weak during this tragedy, he stayed faithful, never losing sight of the fact that God WILL take care of him and of all of us and that He has a plan. Even when his world was flipped upside down and he had no perception of reality, he still had faith at his core, never faltering even at his lowest moments. This ultimate faith and strength is what I strive for each day, and what I hope to one day have.

life is too short to spend another day at war with yourself.

"... and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And that's where the power of love comes in. Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are."

Because of everything that's happened with my dad with his memory loss and cancer, I've learned that you can never fully understand or get used to a tragedy in your life. As I've gotten older, I am able to see different aspects of the situation that I couldn't see when it first occurred. For example, when he first came home and had no short term memory, I focused on how it affected me and my immediate life because I was so young. I tried my best to avoid getting emotional and to just adapt and get used to the fact that he was going to depend on me more than the other way around. Now, although I still struggle with those aspects, new struggles come to the surface. I can see the way my dad's disability has affected his potential at living a full life. I can see everything  that he would've been able to experience, but now never can. I can see how his friends are affected; they essentially lost an irreplaceable friend. Furthermore, I can see what my mom has lost as well. I now realize more of what that may feel like, which I could never have fathomed six years ago.

Sometimes, when I become overwhelmed and distraught over these and other realities, I get frustrated with myself, wondering why I would still get upset after all these years, when I should already be fully accustomed to it all. I realize, though, that my maturing mind is just grasping the traumatic situation in new ways. This is what happens with any major obstacle we face in life. We can never fully get over it. This may seem unfortunate and pessimistic, but I see it as an ever present chance to learn more about myself and others and to be able to grow as a person. I would undo my dads memory loss in a heartbeat, but since I can't, I know that God will use it to teach me lessons, pushing me to be the best person I can be. If everyone at least tries to take this approach (it can be downright impossible at times, even for me), life will seem brighter and peace will be achieved.

stay hungry. stay foolish.

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, it's 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 it's 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.

rip steve jobs.

‎"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." - Steve Jobs