Christian Science Monitor
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.
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.
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”
ReplyDelete— Steven Jobs, The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993
From Today’s NYT:
ReplyDeleteTo the Editor:
Amid all the hosannas to Steven P. Jobs, we might pause to remind ourselves that he was also known for publicly humiliating his employees and abruptly firing them during angry tantrums.
The ultimate measure of a human being is not the objects he produced, but the way he treated other people — especially those over whom he had power or authority. And on that measure, Mr. Jobs fell short.
JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Oct. 6, 2011
The writer is a professor of education and history at New York University