Showing posts with label Achievements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Achievements. Show all posts

Nov 7, 2009

Determination

My domestic worker has impressed me last night, with her new skill; she was attempting to play Sudoko.

For the past few months, she was observing me playing it, it seems while I was away, trying to do it, I need to start teaching her and I know she will beat me in the game and I don't mind.

Mar 26, 2009

A short note

Some how, Oman celebrated Mohsin Al Busaidy's arraival from his sailing experience and becoming the 1st Arab & Omani to ever sail non-stop arround the world.

A group devoted to him has been created in facebook. Posters and campaigns everywere all over Muscat Region (were I live & commute) for supporting him. Why no one is doing the same with Ahmed Al Harthy, the first formula racer? No national sponsors willing to support him.

Best wishes to other Omanis who don't get recognitions from their own people.

Aug 12, 2008

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish

An article that worth reading. Enjoy it.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered 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, its 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 its 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.

Dec 26, 2007

God's mercy

I always remember things happens to me, which tends to go against me always tends to be in my side. I belive it's God's mercy to me because of my deeds as well as my parents & loved one's too.

One day I was angry from someone for not be consider my situation & asks me to do something, on my way to pick up the person, it was drizzling, I prayed to God to cure everyone who I care about, and give me the strength to calm down & it happened.

I was training my co-workers to use a new system that will be used internaly by my department, I managed to get good & usefull feedbacks that I was happy to accept it, some was about to impove my methods and skills of delivering the contents & become better presenter.

Dec 23, 2007

Eid has been fruitfull

This Eid has been a very fruitfull for me & my siblings as well with my cousins, as for the past four days we have been meeting either for lunch or dinner.

It had a different flavour as we bonded more with my female cousins despite difference in age, came to know how we can handle each's jokes & discussed several serious issues that made us see how others think of. Everyone was her self, in a safe level of confidence & some how everyone managed to respect each other & no influences or over power others been seen.

I'm glad that my mission is been truely acomplished in the right track without offencing anyone or a fight & I'm glad that everyone are enjoying the victory.

Dec 8, 2007

Random thoughts while on the job

Finally completed my assignment & forwarded to my senior co-worker to finalise & draft the report.

I have to take all the work done by copy & past as well as scanning documents and uploading them to the Audit Management System then finalize it.

Dec 7, 2007

Best lesion lesson I learnt

I learnt that if you ever get attacked or defeated just get up and start healing your self or start medicating at the same time move on with your life.

Dec 4, 2007

And the 1st round is over

We the champions completed the 1st round of the challenge (the physical challenge) & on our way to the next challenge, the series of challenges has just started and we are ready for it.

Burnt flesh

We been playing physical games, we been divided into several color codes women in pick, team spirit is gone high. I'm still battling.

Department day out

Now I am posting from Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa - Sultanate of Oman via my Nokia E65. I am having breakfast with my department co-workers at Samba rest in Al Waha hotel for the journy of the 2nd day out event of the year, but its my first day out with them.

Today I see everyone's casual look.

I'll post the updates when ever I get the chance.

Apr 4, 2006

Smile

A person dear to me has passed recently, his death has effected me and the people around me, his death made me think and learn the hard way of life.

The things I started learning is how to cope with people and their attitude towards me as its not worth it to get angry as nothing we gain by getting furious and razing my blood pressure up and they don’t even have the curtsy or care about how I feel.

The other thing I stated seriously thinking of pressure my writings as to improve my capabilities in this field, write not as an armature but learn from my mistakes and write nothing negative but positive as the positive in behaviour, gesture and thoughts much healthier then anything.

Smiling makes me feel much relaxed and happier even around me.

That’s all for now, enjoy reading my journals.

Mar 12, 2006

What a day

Been a quiet person when someone blows up at my face when I did something wrong or been criticized, my mind freezes for a while and gets num until after few hours or minutes, depends on how long the criticism was, but this time I won a battle of been wickedly framed for something I never thought of or never crossed my mind and it proven to me that I can stand up for my self and win a battle of truth and fight for my rights and able to save my self and my beloved ones from the devilish minds.

I can’t believe my self that I managed to defend my self in few seconds when I started to be accused and I had all the answers escaping my mind through my mouth and I thank God for giving me such power to prove that I was right and the accuser was 100% wrong.

The accuser tried to justify and apologies to me after she was shocked when I defended my self and I told her “No need to apologies, I’m not angry because it’s the way you think and not mine, no need to feel sorry”.