Dear Hamlet: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

I am a diehard Apple fan.

I grew up on Macs. I am one of the few people in the world that has never owned a Windows machine nor ever had to work on one (unless it was at school, which I resented very much). I enjoy the humanistic approach to computing and the idea that technology can change and improve our lives by being more than a simple tool that we use and abuse and instead providing something emotional. Good design solicits an emotional response—thus the great loyalty of Apple's customers. The powerful experience that a well-designed piece of technology can provide fascinates me. I believe that design can make the world a better place not simply by making it more beautiful (which happens to be a rather superficial purpose of design), but instead by making things more usable, easier to understand, and more enjoyable. It provides efficiency and streamlines everyday life. And so, I love Apple products.

Steve Jobs died this past week. It obviously made quite an impact on the world. It certainly impacted me. (Steve Jobs was the founder and CEO of Apple.)

Steve Jobs was a man I greatly admired for his motivation and the great self-discipline he exercised to achieve his goals. At his commencement address delivered at Stanford University in 2005, he said:

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.

He also said:

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.

And finally:

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.

All of these are great quotes containing much wisdom. Lately I have been considering where I want my life to go with my career and my family, and these ideas have certainly come up. Sometimes, I find it is easier to have fantastic musings of what life could be rather than to set goals and work to make life that way. I want to be a designer. But sometimes it is easier to look at good design than it is to make good design. So much of what we want is so much easier to imagine and observe than to do. So what motivates us—or at least some of us—to actually do it?

I think that the answer to that question is different for everyone. For Steve Jobs, it was the idea of death. For Hamlet, what was it? There was the thought of vengeance for his father, but really, what was his motivation? I don't think there was one. Hamlet lacked enough real conviction to actually do anything. He talked about it all the time, and thought about it (this is reminding me of me), but that was much easier than actually acting. Ironically, at least when juxtaposed against the statements of Steve Jobs that I have included, Hamlet met Death rather tragically, having done little if anything to right the wrongs that were done against his family. Everyone died; at least, everyone that he loved. Claudius may have been killed and, in a sense, served vengeance, but did it really have a purpose? It was basically in vain.

Anyways, my point is, how can anyone accomplish anything without good perspective and good motivation and a desire to succeed? Hamlet seemed to lack all of these things. He was a whiner. He didn't man up and make something of himself. He didn't work to accomplish anything. He failed.

At the end of his commencement address, Steve Jobs recalled his fascination when he was younger with The Whole Earth Catalog:

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.

I think that Hamlet could have used that advice. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. So could the rest of us.