Kony and Kissinger: Jacob and Trayvon

April 20, 2012 is supposed to be D-DAY for Joseph Kony, thanks to a 30-minute video by Jason Russell, co-founder of the US-based NGO Invisible Children. In less than five days, Russell’s video garnered over 55 million hits on YouTube. It provides a moving, graphic, and simplistic story about Kony, the evil war criminal and founder of the Lord’s Resistance Army who is allegedly responsible for the abduction, rape, and abuse of 60,000 children over the past two decades.

“Kony 2012” ends with a rousing call to action to young people to make Kony “famous.” The mobilized youth are to plaster cities across the United States with Kony’s image, so that US politicians and decision makers intervene—supplying Uganda and other Central African nations with US military advisors and resources to track down the war criminal and bring him to justice.

Those of us who have spent a lifetime seeking to achieve social change and justice are awed by the sheer potential of this video. As the Israeli paper Haaretz warned in a March 14 editorial, “Israel should take note of ‘Kony 2012.’ It would not be far-fetched to assume that a similar film will be made about the Palestinian conflict. And once the heartrending images of bleeding children are seared into the consciousness of tens of millions of people, it’s doubtful that even 46 pauses for applause in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to AIPAC will be able to erase the damage.”

It is a wonderful thing to live in times when media access is broad enough that people can view a video and then be mobilized to try to put away someone who has brought violence, abuse, and death to thousands of people in Uganda and across Central Africa. That same access made it possible for the followers of the video to learn that its maker—a passionate advocate for Kony’s capture and the father of two children—was arrested for bizarre and perhaps lewd behavior just a few nights ago. It made it possible for us to learn the dubious details about the financials of Invisible Children. It allowed us to learn that Invisible Children has financial support from right-wing Christian fundamentalist groups that are homophobic and may have supported the current law being debated in Uganda making homosexuality a crime punishable by death. It has also resulted in numerous statements issued by Ugandans and other Africans who demand an end to the presentation of African children and adults as needing to be saved by well meaning Americans.

Although it’s impossible to predict what will happen next month, I suspect we won’t see the kind of mass action that Russell hoped would propel the United States to send military advisors to Uganda and provide East African troops with weapons to capture Kony. I hope young Americans can be similarly motivated by filmmakers who may try to use this medium to achieve justice for Trayvon Martin—a black teenager who recently was shot by an armed neighborhood-watch volunteer in broad daylight in a gated community in Sanford, Fla.

Unlike the Ugandan children in Russell’s video and its main character Jacob Acaye, Trayvon was not kidnapped by a warlord. He did not live in the middle of a war zone in Africa. He was not abducted in the middle of the night. He was simply coming back from the grocery store with a bag of Skittles in his hands and a hoodie over his head. His crime was being a young black man in a southern state with a legacy of racism and new laws that go by the innocuous title “Stand your Ground”—laws that are a thinly veiled pretext for the use of concealed weapons to “defend” one self in the case of a “perceived threat.”

This use of force to resolve conflict—the choice to fight fire with fire, so to speak, is one of my grave concerns about the Kony video. From the opening sequences in which Russell’s four-year-old son imagines a video game to bomb and destroy “bad guys,” to the video’s recommendations for US military intervention, viewers of “KONY 2012” are encouraged to make Kony a household name in the United States, thereby pressuring lawmakers to use military force in central Africa. After a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the death of more than 6,000 US troops and close to 1 million Iraqis and Afghans in wars ironically titled Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, it is chilling that a call to bring a war criminal to trial requires more soldiers, more military advisors, and more weapons.

That message of militarism in the Kony video is not the only thing that causes me unease. The video completely fails to acknowledge that we live in a world where power is unevenly distributed. It is a world where mass action by American teenagers can presumably "save" Africans and find the “bad guy" Kony, but also one in which it is not considered appropriate for Ugandans, Congolese, or Vietnamese activists to make videos exhorting their young people to pressure their governments to send military advisors to the United States to round up alleged war criminals there. More than four decades after the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians as a result of the napalm bombings authorized by Henry Kissinger, and over a decade after the illegal invasion of a country that did not attack the United States, there is no global call to go after men like Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, or George H. W. Bush. Indeed, the United States is not a party to the very international criminal court (ICC) that is so prominently spoken of in the video, because it would require that Americans be held to the same standards as war criminals from other nations. In the narrative exemplified by “Kony 2012,” it is Americans who write history and Africans who are victims in need of American help.

Yet, if I have learned one thing in my 15 years at the Global Fund for Women, it is that while food and clean drinking water may be lacking in many of the world’s poorest nations—courage, dignity, and resilience are to be found on every street corner and in the most humble barrios. Ordinary people—mothers, school teachers, doctors, and farmers—have been standing up to warlords like Joseph Kony and thousands like him from the smallest villages of Sierra Leone and Liberia to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Leymah Gbowee, who received a $5,000 grant in 2003 from the Global Fund for Women for her organizing work, was the 2011 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She worked quietly and determinedly for many years without recognition along with thousands of other women in Liberia to challenge the violence of dictator Charles Taylor and the LURD rebels. Patricia Guerrero in Colombia, founder of La Liga Mujeres Desplazadas, will remind you that men with weapons—whether they are named Zimmerman and live in Florida or whether they belong to the Colombian army or the FARC rebels—are no friends to civilians.

Military intervention is often foreign policy folly. In the 20th century, American military advisors in Latin America helped oversee the brutal death squads of juntas in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, not to mention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Women and their families are still paying the price for those travesties of justice. Just this past week, a single US soldier using a semiautomatic weapon killed 16 Afghans, although he cannot recall the incident.

Weapons, particularly the small arms that have flooded Central Africa and Latin America, give men the power to kill, maim, rape, and terrorize. Let’s not repeat history by calling for Congress to authorize more men with guns to go in search of the “bad guy.” Let us catalyze the power and inherent democratic promise of social media and hope that the next video calling for civil society to hold war criminals accountable—or for peace in Central Africa—will focus on long-term solutions beginning with an end to the sale and trade of weapons as Amnesty International has done. Let us hope there will soon be a D-DAY for weapons that kill and maim children whether they are Ugandans called Jacob or Americans called Trayvon.

Kavita Ramdas is executive director of Ripples to Waves: Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, and served as president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women from 1996 to 2010.

Where Are the Women?

 

Today is international women’s day. The last few weeks have suddenly moved women’s health issues to the headlines. From Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut for speaking out on the importance of birth control access for women’s health; to outrage expressed by religious leaders about employers having to pay for health insurance coverage that included access to contraception; to Virginia’s law on mandated ultrasounds, we have been painfully reminded about how vital it is to have equal representation of women at the decision making tables in domestic politics. We asked: where are the women?

Despite the gains women have made socially and economically – and their contributions public health -- major philanthropic resources remain controlled by a few very wealthy men such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Richard Branson. The Gates Foundation accounted for 4% of all global spending on health in 2009, and, as Forbes recently noted, Bill Gates provides most of the private money for public health.

It was startling to witness the Congressional hearing on insurance coverage for birth control in which an all white, all male panel was treated as the expert consultant on the matter. Representative Carolyn Maloney said, “When I look at this panel, I don’t see one single woman representing the tens of millions of women across the country that want and need insurance coverage for basic preventive healthcare services, including family planning. Where are the women?”

Before we could catch our breath, wealthy business man Foster Friess, widely credited with funding Rick Santorum’s political resurrection – dismissed the controversy saying that in his day, women knew how to use their aspirin as a contraceptive – they simply put it between their knees.

Around the same time, the Virginia legislature pushed for a bill that would mandate a vaginal ultrasound for all women seeking an abortion. This invasive procedure, which technically meets the VA criteria for rape, has no medical justification. David Albo, a Virginia lawmaker changed his vote on the bill. His reason, he explained, was that his wife refused to be intimate with him when she heard his name mentioned on TV in support of the bill. He claimed he had to change his vote if he hoped to resume marital relations. The almost all male legislature guffawed. And then there were Rush Limbaugh’s comments -- and troubling comments by liberal commentators as well. Where are the women?

The dismal representation of women, who make up less than 16% of the U.S. Congress, in politics is clearly a problem. Still, every elected member of Congress regardless of gender is theoretically accountable to men and women in roughly equal proportion. And at least public Congressional hearings ensure that the public knows when there are no women at the table.

Philanthropists, unlike lawmakers, aren’t elected and do not have to hold public hearings to explain their decisions on how their money will be directed.  Resent research suggests that the wealthy are less empathetic to the needs of others. People with lower incomes tend to give a greater percentage of their incomes to help others and show greater empathy and compassion -- perhaps because they know they might face the same circumstances.

With few exceptions, the leading women in philanthropy, notably Melinda Gates, are the wives or daughters of rich and powerful men. This doesn’t diminish the work that they do. Still, women must have a place at the table that is not based on their relationships to powerful men. Women and their dependent children make up 70% of the poor, but women comprise only 2 percent of the world’s self-made billionaires.

We derive some comfort from the likelihood that Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, a women’s rights advocate, will soon be joining that elite group and in the success of efforts like Women moving Millions that raised over $180 million for women’s funds and causes last year. Sara Blakely, the creator of Spanx, just joined the ranks of self-made billionaires. Even with these bright spots, the statistics are daunting – giving to organizations led by and serving primarily women and girls made up less than 5.7% of all philanthropic giving in 2010 and of that, less than 2% went to women outside the United States. If a primarily male economic elite continues to drive and shape global policy that affects the well-being and health of women across the globe, we may find ourselves once again asking: “Where are the women?”

Beyond Vietnam: In Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 
"Abba, Amma, did you know we used to have to ride on the back of the bus?" our five year old daughter Mira Husnara emerged from her Kindergarten class full of indignation.  "And," she added breathlessly, "did you know, that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks fought for us so we can swim in a swimming pool and not in the Mississippi?"  We smiled - our dark skinned daughter, born on the South Side of Chicago and growing up in  pale Palo Alto, appeared to have found her sense of belonging and community. Celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday was her introduction to the gross inequalities and divisions of the United States, but also to a rich heritage of social justice, human rights activism, and non-violent resistance.

Our daughter is now 18 and on the cusp of a new adventure as she readies herself for college.  She has grown up watching King's dream for greater racial equality in the United States is on its way to being partially realized.  In her sophomore year at high school, a black man with a Muslim middle name that sounds close to hers, Barack Hussein Obama, was elected President of the United States.  Yet, she also has grown up in a world where the United States has been at war for the greater part of her childhood.  It still is.  

Pakistan, home to my husband’s family is known to her friends for being a scary place - home to Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, military dictatorships and coups.  She has grown up traveling between the US, Pakistan and India and is used to being pulled aside for special security screenings because she and her father have names that match suspects on the "list".  The United States, which we once viewed as valuing social equality in ways that could be models for India and Pakistan, has become one of the most unequal societies in the developed world.  Mira has been exposed to great wealth and privilege in this suburban town, but barely a mile away across Route 101 in East Palo Alto, Latino and African American families live from paycheck to paycheck, without access to good schools or healthcare, and vulnerable to violence in their everyday lives.   

In other words, the other part of King's dream, his hope for a more egalitarian and peaceful world, is far from being realized. On his birthday most of us hear and read excerpts from King's famous "I have a dream" speech.  Yet, it is King's “BeyondVietnam” that is the one that goes beyond the issues of racial equality and civil rights.  He bluntly denounces the US invasion in Vietnam, challenges the direction of global capitalism and calls for a  "a true revolution of values”.  This new approach he asserted, “will look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just."

King goes on to argue that it is only through such a transformation of values that communism can be challenged.  It is easy to substitute Islamic fundamentalism or terrorism for communism in the following passage: "This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops." 

The year that has just ended began with remarkable and largely peaceful protests by common people on the streets of Tunisia and Egypt that led to ousters of dictators and serious challenges to military regimes long propped up by the United States. These struggles are far from done and here again King's words have much resonance: "These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. We in the West must support these revolutions. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” 

This is not a popular message in today's world where force is regularly used to settle conflict and where the United States has the world's largest defense budget and remains the world's most significant military power.  He minced no words when he said, "A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." He went on to add, "The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform."  He might easily be speaking about the despotic governments that the activists of the Arab Spring sought to topple, many of which remain allies of the United States. Saudi Arabia recently received a commitment of over $60 billion in armament sales. 

In an ironic twist, the Obama administration has been forced to redo King's quote on the newly innagurated memorial in DC.  It  is an apt metaphor for how totally we have forgotten King's radical call to action. "We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."  These words were not written or spoken in a post 9/11, post Arab Spring, post Occupy Wall Street world but they were never more relevant than they are now.  If Mira and her generation are to have a fighting chance to transcend the wars of Iraq, Afganistan and Pakistan and realize King’s dream, they will need the wisdom, humility and courage of "Beyond Vietnam".

Peace Unveiled and the Truth Unveiled: Women, War and Peace

October 27, 2011

"Disillusioned", "outraged", "despairing", "frustrated", "conflicted", "sad", "hypocritical", "shaken", "angry", the words came tumbling out.  A small group of students at EAST house on Stanford's campus had gathered to watch and discuss "Peace Unveiled", the third in Women, War and Peace, a 5 part series on PBS, created and filmed by Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker. As usual, there was much else happening on campus - across the way in the brand new business school Knight Management center, Laura Arriallaga was launching her new book, "Giving 2.0" In it, she argues it is not how much you give, it is how you give.

Giving. The women of Afghanistan profiled in Peace Unveiled know a lot about the how of giving.  For over 30 years now, they have given their lives, their health, their safety, their security, and their dignity in the struggle for freedom, peace, and equality. Activist philanthropist Abby Disney captures on film their fierce desire to do something, not just to better the status of women, but to change the future of their country.  The filmmakers also mince no words about how little support women, (or for that matter, men) in Afghanistan, can count on from the United States or the international community in this battle. In careful painstaking, yet nuanced detail we learn how the words spoken by the diplomats fail to translate into protection for women's rights.  "Where after all do human rights begin?" asked Eleanor Roosevelt many years ago. "In small places, close to home, so small you cannot see them on a map." 

The film shows us the difference women's leadership is making in those small places - the young man in Kandahar bursting with pride as he speaks of his mother, who is now a delegate to the peace talks.  The little granddaughter parading in a burka behind her grandmother because she wants to leave the house to go to Kabul too.  The lone female Afghan voice at an international donor gathering making a presentation that claims space and rights for women.  The filmmakers strike a fine balance between those glimpses of "another world that is possible and breathing and on her way" with brutally honest clips that expose the double standards that the West imposes on Afghanistan. We watch the Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador who once spoke so forcefully against Karzai, urge a delegation of women to back down and be more forgiving of what transpired in the past to enable the US to make a "better case" for supporting the Karzai government to forge a "peace deal" that will include negotiating with the Taliban. We watch Hillary Clinton promise the Afghan representatives that she will never accept a peace deal that is pushed through at the expense of women and then we watch the peace jirga where women sit in stony silence as Mujahideen warlords, war criminals, and known Islamic extremists are showered with kisses and affection by an effusive Karzai.  One brave woman stands and shakes her fist, shouting that she cannot accept this travesty of justice in the name of "so called" peace.  Karzai laughs and she turns and walks proudly out of the gathering.

I saw the same pride and determination in the Afghan women I met in 2003 in Kabul and earlier this year when I was in Peshawar, Pakistan for the Global Fund for Women.  For all the intentional and unintended efforts by extremists and/or the mainstream media to turn women and girls into victims, there are hundreds of stories of quotidien resistance.  They stand up and demand to be noticed.  They send their children to school.  They teach school and train teachers.  They lead civil society organizations like the Afghan Institute for Learning (AIL) and the Afghan Women's Network (AWN).  They find a way to feed their children despite having little or no access to jobs. They laugh and sing the latest Hindi movie songs.  They run for office.  They eat ice-cream in the open.  They teach their daughters and their sons soccer.  And whether covered in burkas or deliberately unveiled, they walk tall carrying the weight of their world with grace and tenacity. That is Giving 10.0.

Remembering Steve - the 10th day after.

October 16, 2011

Singapore

 I left Palo Alto on Oct 5th, the day that Steve Jobs died.  We heard from our daughter Mira, who called us from her editing job at the Viking, Palo Alto High School's Sports Magazine.  Zuli and I had been expecting this news for a long time and yet the impact of it was terribly sad and numbing. Mira came home and Zuli cooked a big batch of khichidi, a mixture of dal and rice, Indian comfort food, for dinner.  Steve would have loved it. He loved Indian food. 

I like imagining that in some virtual paradise Steve and Gandhiji (whom he came to resemble in strange ways as he neared his end) are eating dal and rice together and chuckling about the different paths of purpose that they took - the radical activist and the radical entrepreneur.


For the past ten days after that dinner I have been on the road in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Hyderabad, Dubai. Everywhere people have spoken about their mourning Steve's passing. I have listened to ordinary people's expressions of grief and loss and been been humbled at the remarkable human response to the loss of another human being who lived a life of purpose and touched so many lives.  And, yes, I know that most of us don't respond that way when a million lives are lost in a famine, but it doesn't make the experience any less moving.


So, just because I have enjoyed reading this Stanford speech by Steve everytime I read it and in a tribute to his life - I thought I would simply offer it up. Namaste.

You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says 

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.