In the commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs said,
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.
Many of us wouldn’t ask this question every morning. If we did, we may say “No” for many days in a row, then we might stop asking the question. Numbness gets formed in our mind. Then we might start to feel where being stuck there would be the norm and thus to be justified. No change is good. Change is bad. When we see people who are changing their course, they annoy us. We want to criticize them.
Are we good?
In a chapter of Getting Real, it says something completely different:
Be a surfer. Watch the ocean. Figure out where the big waves are breaking and adjust accordingly.
My version of it is slightly different as it intends to be applicable to a broader context. I rarely talk about this kind of stuff, but let me try to be philosophical for a moment:
You are a skater. You don’t stand still, but you keep moving. Sometimes fast, other times slow. Your current stride will lead you to the next stride.
There are two distinct things implied here. One is something in progress and the other is what has happened. Let me look at the first aspect. As a skater, you are in need of making the choice about the next stride, otherwise you would eventually fall. You may be about to choose to go to the right but all of sudden you may decide to choose to the left. As such, possible choices are open for your selection although the past choices you've already made are somehow constraining the available choices. Your choice making is happening in the very you, in the present progressive mode. I don't get to control you from outside.
Let me look at the latter aspect. You have just made a choice on the next stride and it now gets captured in the frozen record. We have a sequence of your strides in the past, which nobody can change. Yet I can refer to them. People can talk about them.
Those two aspects - the very you at this present moment (your becoming) and "you" in the record are connected yet distinct.
If we dismiss this distinction, which most people do, all we do is that we describe you by referring to the record, and make the description in the present tense so we can apply it to the past, present and future. When those statements are applied to you, the aspect of your becoming gets ignored or even sometimes disallowed. These days, people sometimes get mad if the description they derived from the record cannot explain your latest stride. I think it is violence against your becoming.
I think most people have a tendency to search for stability to feel secure. When people feel insecure, they tend to overreact. These come from our survival instinct, so I wouldn’t say they are necessarily a bad thing. What’s unfortunate, however, is that we use the descriptions stated in the present tense only to perceive pseudo stabilities. The descriptions in the present tense seem very stable and robust because it gives us an impression that they are applicable universally over time. However, this apparent stability is only a perception. The true stability, or robustness, if ever possible, is in perpetually making good, bold and sometimes bad strides.
As a consequence of the tendency of seeking stability coupled with the ignorance of the aspect of becoming, we end up with being violent against others’ becoming. And does harm to the source of our robustness. I find it ironical.
We may stumble or fall on the ice skating rink, but we would eventually be better to make a good stride after another. Sometimes a bad one, but we could make the next stride bold. When we reach a point where we keep making great strides, the world starts to feel different - the crisp air on your cheek becomes pleasant.
We are free to skate. I would like to remember that.