I had originally chosen a more turquoise shade but was afraid it might read too green or teal instead of turquoise. This bright blue is more vibrant and looks great. Moving in slowly this week.
I just picked up the keys yesterday for our new store opening soon in Little Italy. The exterior will be painted this week in a turquoise blue, a color I personally love and identify with since I intuitively always choose to work with any blue stones, especially natural turquoise from the American southwest and Australian blue opals.
I recently heard an amazing interview with the author. Everything she spoke about is so relevant to my personal belief that everything in our life is related and sometimes we overlook the thread of connectivity because of our chaotic environment. An inspiring woman with an amazing lifelong dedication to her work. Read more here
This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, 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 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.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/steve-jobs-patents.html?hp
6 more weeks until our new retail store opens on 10/1/11. Find out more at www.lostwaxstudio.com or follow our progress https://www.facebook.com/pages/LOST-WAX-STUDIO/243018172382603?sk=wall
I've been going to this part of the shore for the past 15 years and my kids love the big waves. It's all about family/friends/kids at this part of the beach. Beach all day, bbq then maybe boardwalk late into the night. The beach pass girl made me this bracelet. This past weekend was amazing with the sunset in the bay and the full moon on the ocean side!!!
This is one of those events that I have always wanted to attend but have never gotten the chance due to busy summer family schedules. Apparently lots of people enjoy the music from their boats in the harbor, sounds amazing!!!! Maybe next year.
Mainers always have a blanket/tablecloth in their car for these lobster roll stops. This is a local Sunday summer evening scene in Stonington, large families with picnic baskets and wine at a hard-to-find local clam bar on the bay in Connecticut.
this is always a fun day and for once it wasn't sweltering.....loved the doll.....bought the booties for a friend's baby......and the messenger bag for my son. More details at the links below:
i ♥ dad...all dads need a new shirt...JL's are hand tailored locally in i♡NY ...meticulous details....gorgeous fabrics and colors...now 30% off this week...11 Little W. 12th st NYC...http://jussaralee.com/
This is always a fun outing, good stuff...bad stuff...weird stuff...handmade goods from real people nationwide and locally.
Public art Madison Square Park more info about the Spanish artist, Jaume Plensa and his sculpture below.Over the past three decades, the celebrated Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa has established an international reputation for creating public sculptures that are both monumental in scale and emotionally engaging in subject. Working in a wide variety of materials, Plensa has invigorated the practice of figurative sculpture with works that examine the intersection of the human form, language and communication, and global citizenship. Echo, a new site-specific sculpture for Madison Square Park, marks Plensa’s long-awaited New York City public space debut, and constitutes the largest monolithic work of art to be presented in Mad. Sq. Art’s seven-year history.
Echo, Plensa’s commission for Madison Square Park, depicts a nine-year old girl from Plensa’s Barcelona neighborhood, lost in a state of thoughts and dreams. Standing forty-four feet tall at the center of the park’s expansive Oval Lawn, Echo’s towering stature and white marble-dusted surface harmoniously reflect the historic limestone buildings that surround the park. Both monumental in size and inviting in subject, the peaceful visage of Echo creates a tranquil and introspective atmosphere amid the cacophony of central Manhattan.
Plensa’s sculpture also refers to an episode in Greek mythology in which the loquacious nymph Echo is forced as punishment to repeat only the thoughts of others. Plensa’s Echo plays on the narrative of this Greek myth by depicting a young girl’s face in a state of reverie, translating this sculptural portrait into a physical monument of the internalized voices of the thousands of daily visitors to Madison Square Park.
http://www.madisonsquarepark.org/things-to-do/calendar/jaume-plensa-in-madison-square-park
I just came across this interesting blog by Lloyd Kahn, founder of WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. What a treat to be able to get insight and his POV from his home base in Marin County, CA.
Next Saturday my friend, Jussara, will be hosting a trunk show for me at her boutique in the meatpacking NYC. Jussara has been making amazing hand tailored suits for the past 10 years from her shop in the meatpacking area. Every detail is meticulously considered and designed to be timelessly classic but modern and relevant for chic urban lifestyles. I love all my gorgeous clothes from Jussara, I just throw one of her jackets on over my usual casual studio outfits and I'm ready for a meeting/lunch date. 
Many of my friends love to visit my studio and see me work and check out all the equipment and tools. I like to recycle and reuse everything if I can. This image above is the preparation of silver scraps getting ready to be melted together to make one big sheet or wire of silver that can be made into something else.
If this summer finds you in either Great Barrington or Amagansett please visit my friend's newly opened stores where I will be showing my jewelry with lots of bright fun things for summer:
I collaborated with the costume designer, Susan Lyall, to create special pieces for Jodie Foster (director/actor) in THE BEAVER which received a standing ovation at this year's CANNES FILM FESTIVAL.
mix and layer with gold bangles, friendship bracelets etc.
Recently I walked across the bridge one early morning encountering mostly tourists and joggers.
Sonia Delaunay's work is very identifiable but what I took away from this show was her contribution and influence in the interiors world with her work for METZ&CO, a Dutch department store. 
 Vivienne Westwood, “Rocking Horse” boots, leather and wood, 1987, England, Gift of Francisco Melendez A.K.A. Francois. | Vivienne Westwood 1980-89 will be the first exhibition to focus exclusively on Westwood’s fashions of the 1980s and highlight the significant shift in Westwood’s design style during this decade. Her work of the early 1980s was prominently featured in edgy magazines such as i-D, and her following was comprised mainly of street-style insiders. By 1985, her more structured, feminine, and historically-inspired styles began to attract the attention of the mainstream press and widened Westwood’s audience. The exhibition will include a unisex ensemble from the Pirate collection (1981), a woman’s ensemble from the influential Buffalo collection (1982) and a pair of Westwood’s iconic “Rocking Horse” boots from the Harris Tweed collection (1987). Editorial photographs from magazines such as The Face and British Vogue will further illuminate Westwood’s impact on 1980s fashion, as will runway footage and video interviews with the designer. |
