Unconditional love
The term ‘love’ is frequently used to describe love between lovers. On the other hand, ‘unconditional love’ is used to portray love between family members, friends and between others in committed relationships. When you love someone regardless of their actions or beliefs, you express unconditional love. True love is unconditional love towards one and all. Like the sun’s rays, it is warm; like rose petals, it adds colour and joy to life; like a mountain stream, it flows freely and encircles all creation.

The reason people tend to express anger, confusion and resentment is because of the lack of unconditional love. Our emotional need for unconditional love is like our physical need for food and air. Where unconditional love is missing, people tend to behave in an abnormal way and tend to adopt violent and aggressive means to gain attention.

Giving without any expectations
Unconditional love is giving love without any condition or expectation in return. Once we love others in true spirit, we strike a chord with the universe and radiate the positive energy of love from within us like the sun. Again like the sun, the Power of Love thrives on itself. When we radiate true love, we receive true love in return.

When you start loving all life on earth with an equal eye, you generate a strong sense of interconnection with everything. Since we all thrive on common resources such as food, air, shelter and water, we share a strong connection with each and every being. Thus, the Power of Love is always available to us. You can tap this potential by cultivating a heart that gives and receives without expectations.

‘We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.’ —Sir Winston Churchill

Love teaches humility
Love can instil humbleness in you. Through humility you can become a person who is eager to learn, grow and acquire new skills through constant improvement. You must embrace humility if you wish to express the greatness and divinity that lies within you. Such modesty can be developed by following a lifestyle of simple living and high thinking. It will help you discover your true nature and qualities such as enthusiasm, wisdom and creativity.

You will realize that there is so much to learn and do in life. Humility instils an urge to be curious and to learn new things. It helps in self-awareness, self-improvement and unlocks the key to greatness. Taking the humble approach means being aware of your weaknesses while developing your strengths.

‘My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.’ —Dalai Lama

Forgiveness is the beauty of the soul and is often denied to it. There may be times when people caused you pain. You will often feel hurt and angry. In such cases, you must learn to let go. You will feel relaxed once you forgive someone who wronged you. You will be relieved of past wounds and unconditional love will fill that wound in the due course of time. What is most important here is your decision to forgive and forget.

Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and realizing you were the person. —Max Lucado

Till about a century ago, people could travel without a passport or visa anywhere in the world, without any restriction. National boundaries barely existed. After the two World Wars, many nations started feeling insecure, an identity crisis was triggered and narrow nationalistic feelings became stronger. These feelings became so intense that children were taught to take pride only in their nation’s culture and traditions, and the idea of ‘national patriotism’ took root. This, among other things, widened the divide between the rich and poor across the world. But in the 21st century the pace of multicultural social and corporate exchanges has quickened once again. And no matter where you are or what you do, you must try to embrace everyone around you in the blanket of unconditional love.

Two Action Steps:

Step 1: Learn to give without expectations. Whenever you offer any help to a stranger, do it without any expectation in return. There is nothing more valuable than a kind act and when you perform it with unconditional love, a sense of joy will pervade through your being.

Step 2: Be an observer and do not judge people or situations. When you are in an awkward situation, try not judge the situation or the people involved in it. Be open and try to observe the situation as it is and not as you want to see it.

Success Mantra: Remember that love is the strongest power. Love binds us and connects us all. Enlarge your heart and your circle of love: love yourself, your family, your neighbours, those who do not like you, your fellow countrymen, all the citizens of the world and all life on earth. Love everyone, and one day you will find everyone loving you. Begin now.

©Shishir Srivsatava, Motivational Speaker and Author ‘The Eight Powers within You’
www.shishirsrivastava.org and www.eightpowers.com

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.

- Steve Jobs
Founder & CEO of Apple

This is a transcript of Steve Jobs’ commencement address to the graduating class of Stanford in June 2005. One of the most inspiring commencement addresses, this is one speech that doesn’t fail to give some goosebumps and a lump in the throat no matter how many times one reads or hears it. Watch the Stay hungry, stay foolish video.