Was that Really Bad?

Was that really bad? He wasn’t sure.

 

He had dropped out of college. He didn’t have a dorm room, so he slept on the floor in the rooms of kind friends. He sold used Coca-Cola bottles for the five-cent deposit per

 

bottle to buy food. He walked seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. But he didn’t abandon his passion. He was determined to learn calligraphy at the same.institute (Reed’s College)  He learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful and artistically subtle in a way that science couldn’t capture, and he found it fascinating.

 

Some years later, he wrote:

 

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 that calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

 

He asked himself, “Was dropping out of college really that bad?” The answer was a firm no.

 

Life went on. In only ten years he established a great organization, characterized by an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit, in the computing field. As the organization grew, he hired someone whom he thought was very talented to run the company with him. For the first couple of years, things went well. But then the two men’s visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually he had a falling out with his colleague. At the age of thirty, he was fired from his own organization because of collusion in the boardroom. The incident appeared devastating. But he didn’t stop. He discovered new ways of moving ahead.

 

Life went on, and again things turned around. Five years later, he said with joy:

 

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 in 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 world’s 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene 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

 

He again asked himself, “Was that firing really bad?” The answer was a firm no.

 

By now, you might have guessed that this is not a fantasy or fable. What you have just read describes two real incidents from Steve Jobs’s life.

 

As it is with Steve Jobs, so it is with everyone on this earth. We at times label certain events as “bad” because they didn’t happen in the way that we wanted them to unfold. This could be failure in an exam, defeat in a game, loss in an election, setback in business, disappointment in love, death of a loved one, missing an important appointment, being turned down for a promotion. We cry and mourn over such “bad” incidents. We shout and scream in anger and rage.

 

But life goes on (unless we wish to end it). With the passage of time, we find that even incidents that seemed bad or tragic or upsetting have shaped our life in ways that we can only understand and appreciate much later when we look back. The learning, the experience, and the frustration of dealing with the “bad” moments in our life somewhere down the line become sources of inspiration, which help us to keep moving ahead with determination and fortitude.

 

“In the darkness of uncertainty, we see with a torchlight a limited view. But the Almighty sees in sunlight. Have faith and patience.”

 

Reflect on an apparently bad incident in your life, something that seemed most unfortunate, something that appeared to be a huge setback. For a moment, assume that it didn’t happen. Do you find that the pride and joy associated with some of your greatest achievements—or the happiness that you found at a later phase of your life—has been diminished? Do you find that you now have a different perspective when you look back at your past? All the events in our life, all the people we meet, all the problems that we face, and all the opportunities that come our way shape our future course of action. At times, one crucial event or one important individual can determine the entire course of our life. Let’s take a few pages from our notebook and “try to join the dots of life working backwards”.

 

The next time you feel like mourning over some unfortunate incident or brooding about a disappointment, stop and ask yourself, “Was that really bad?” You might be surprised at the answer to your own question. Then you will want to shout at Murphy who said, “If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something”

 

P.S. Article doesn’t intend to portray good/bad, it’s simply an attempt towards creating positive thinking in life. Article is a part of book under composition “Was that really bad”. Pl. mail your suggestions/critic at sharda.gautam@gmail.com/ sharma.pkk@gmail.com , it may helps us in improving the content of the book !!.