Follow your heart and intuition
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 other’s 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.
Background
My dad shared this speech by Steve Jobs made at the Stanford Commencement in 2005. I was very touched when I first read it. In fact, I cried after reading it — and every time I read it, now perhaps for the 50th time, I still shed a tear.
I have always had to navigate very difficult waters doing what I do. I am different. I never fit in. To help you understand a bit of my background — I work professionally as a designer, but I integrate technology as part of my practice. I began programming at a young age, and studied mostly science subjects in high school. Yet after I got to Yale and enrolled in all kinds of subjects because of the liberal arts education, I fell in love with art, and eventually graduated with a degree in art, with a concentration in graphic design. My professional design work often lies at the intersection of art and technology.
In my professional career, I was often put in the uncomfortable situation of having to explain what I do — the designers see me as a programmer who just graduated with a design degree. The programmers think of me as a designer who simply picked up programming as a hobby. But I am neither — I am both. I design with programming, often writing custom programs to drive my design solution. I approach everything with a both-brain approach. I don’t see a divide of having to pick one over another. I don’t know how to explain what I do — now after 20 years working in interactive, I still find myself having trouble explaining my process, simply because it is so different from everyone else’s.
So when I read this commencement speech, it really touches me. It’s been almost 20 years now since this speech was published. Steve Jobs is no longer alive. But this speech would continue to inspire me to follow my own intuition as I navigate life; to do what I feel is important; in ways that I might not ever be able to articulate, and so I try to do it visually, through images — I have never been someone who’s eloquent, so that’s why I write a lot, but I have found a better way to communicate, which is through images. In my professional life, that meant explaining concepts visually. I picked up photography around the time I was at Yale for the same reasons. And now, through AI, as I am able to more fully express my intentions without being dependent on things that physically exist.
I hope that you will find comfort when you read this speech. I hope that it would inspire you to be yourself despite everything and everyone that surrounds you. Most of all, I hope that you would find the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
Tech
- Text prompt in Midjourney v5.2 for composition
- Stable Diffusion img2img with SDXL for male figure
- Adobe Photoshop AI limb fix
- Adobe Lightroom color correction
Images
Stable Diffusion SDXL
Midjourney v5.2
These are used to drive the composition for the SDXL renders.
