Below are two images taken in Central Beijing in Mid October 2011. The first was taken this morning at 7:15AM local time. The second, yesterday at mid day (12:20PM) local time.

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This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by the late Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, 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, it’s 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 it’s 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.“

This years VMworld conference, notably now one of the biggest and most important events in the IT world, was dominated by one theme: Consumerization. Not even having yet found a place in the Engish dictionary, you’d be forgiven for wondering what the word means. No, it’s doesn’t mean people doing more shopping, in fact it’s specific to the IT world and describes the trend of technologies to spread from the consumer IT market to enterprise (e.g. Mobile Apps), rather than the traditional path which is the other way around (e.g. the PC). Do you use your personal mobile phone to check work emails or write work related notes? Do you bring your personal mac, PC or iPad to work? Do you use MSN messenger, professional social networks, or document syncing services for work? Do you find your personal software and favourite websites easier to use and more functional than the ones your business offers? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you represent the fast growing number of employees who are changing the way corporate IT managers are looking at the world. We are moving into an era where consumer technologies are penetrating all aspects of our lives, particularly the workplace.

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The interest from enterprise vendors in this trend is clear; VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s and CTO Steve Herrod lead this year’s VMworld conference with mobile and application focussed keynotes, despite VMware having its technology roots firmly planted in IT infrastructure and server virtualization. They launched their new ‘Project Octopus’, a system that allows users to sync and store documents in a secure environment, similar to Apple’s recently announced iCloud, and T-Cloud’s SecureSync but focussed on enterprise. Some say it will be difficult to pull users data away from this consumer dominated space, with their data already spread around services like Dropbox, Google Apps, and soon iCloud. Others believe enterprises need to lock down their data and create virtual ‘silos’ which span servers, PCs, tablets, and mobile devices and keep corporate data safe and protected from the increased risk of theft or hacking. Whatever the success of VMware and other enterprise vendors in ‘enterprise-ifying’ these popular apps, one thing is for sure, today the growth of data and success of enterprise IT depends dramatically less on a corporate top down approach and more on consumer expectations and habits.

The Man in the Middle

Regardless of how major  IT vendors respond to this trend, I believe it is the CIO and IT managers response that is most crucial. IT managers play an increasingly difficult role of ‘man in the middle’, stuck between a mix of employee demands, software and devices such as iPads and iPhones; and the growing risk of data security, theft, and disaster recovery. IT managers have to balance the potential benefits of consumerization, with the associated risks. And this is not a future trend, it is happening now. According to Unisys’s recent study of 2,820 information worker respondents from ten different countries, over 95% of devices purchased by consumers are also used in a work environment. However, in the same study it was found that 70% of IT managers and employers wanted to standardised devices for their employees. This shows a mismatch between the reality of consumerization in the enterprise, and the IT managers expectations of their system. However, if employers can meet the reality of employee use of personal devices in the workplace head on, rather than just play ‘catch up’ with consumer trends and preference, there is a great opportunity to improve employee satisfaction, productivity, and even lower IT budgets.

And the issue is not just with devices. Many employees use their preferred platforms, applications, and even SaaS as tools in their workplace. I am one of those; a Mac user using Mac apps and SaaS document collaboration tools to aid my work. What does this mean to data security? Enterprise standards & compliance? Scalability? For years enterprise IT and IT departments have failed to keep pace with the rapidly expanding base of easily available and extremely useful tools available to any consumer at the press of a button or swipe of a credit card. This should be a wake up call to managers who want to return IT to it’s once glorious purpose of  aiding enterprise productivity, rather than holding back employees and reducing efficiency with legacy software and rules built for the ‘top down’ era of enterprise IT. It’s time for some radical rethinking of software. Luckily, it’s already begun.

Cloud to the rescue?

Enter Cloud. Cloud, or I should say SaaS, is helping bring enterprises back on track, in line with staff expectations of design and interface gained from social networks, games, and smartphones. Services like Google Docs and Baihui allow employees to collaborate, share data, and work from anywhere, in ways that are not possible with conventional IT software. New enterprise software like Project Octopus and SecureSync will allow enterprises to regain control of the data while offering cloud – like sync services to their employees, keeping data safe but allowing convenient access from anywhere. VDI (Virtual Deskop Infrastructure) allows users access to their desktop environment not only from inside the office but securely from outside and from any device, without file transfers or security holes. But even these technologies may not be enough to shift the momentum of users away from their flashy iPad applications and social networks like QQ and Dropbox, which offer similar services. As well as utilising public and private cloud solutions, IT managers need to find clever ways of allowing access to popular services while maintaining security and educating their employees about the risks of data security.

From fear to leadership

With the rate of development in mobile devices, applications, and the consumer cloud, the average employee can now derive more value from personal IT purchases than from their company’s IT department. However, as well as empowering the employee to become more efficient, these consumer technologies in the workplace can represent significant risk to the IT manager. It’s no surprise then, that the obvious reaction to this trend of consumerization is one of fear. However, I believe through a combination of communication with employees, Cloud solutions, and careful policy-making, IT departments can turn this wave of consumer technology into a major strategic advantage for their whole company.

The first challenge is to recognise the trend, gather data internally about what devices and software staff are using, and carefully open access to useful tools and services. Next, the IT manager can provide a suite of matching tools and software such as SaaS applications which reduce risk and increase employee flexibility. Finally, it is up to the IT manager to help employees understand how to best utilise their personal devices and software for work purposes, while educating them about important topics such as data security, and regular backup. A simple idea such as providing a free secure backup service for employees’ mobile devices and laptops can both help win the employee over to the value of the IT dept, and help protect important company information which might only reside on a their personal laptop from loss or theft. Gartner believes the consumerization of IT is the most significant trend affecting the IT Industry in the next ten years, even bigger than Cloud Computing. I believe these two massive trends are fundamentally linked; that IT managers now have a unique opportunity to shift their thinking from one of fear to one of leadership, and to help their organisations gain a competitive edge by empowering staff with next generation, flexible and secure IT solutions.

I was in a meeting with Ciscos China GM for Datacenter Virtualization, Charleston Sin last week and he asked the same billion dollar question everyone’s been asking in China and worldwide recently: “How big do you think the Cloud Market will become?”, adding, “HQ is always asking for our numbers.” He’s not alone, analysts and technology leaders all over the world are asking and being asked this question. The problem for us all is what exactly does this question mean, or more specifically, what does Cloud Market mean?

I remember when I was working on my web startup in 2007 the global web community was engaged in excitement and fierce debate about Web 2.0 and what it meant. Web 2.0 was going to change everything, all new websites were ‘Web 2.0 enabled’, and investors were going crazy about Web 2.0 startups. Web 2.0 started when browsers got more powerful, javascript and html aquired new functionality, new server side scripting technologies became easier to use, and we learned how to scale web apps horizontally to provide applications that could support massive user bases and storage capacities. Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, and hundreds more websites like them emerged. They were the pioneers of what the analysts began calling ‘Web 2.0′. For a while every new website called itself ‘Web 2.0′ and even the corporate world of enterprise started trying to work out how they could use ‘Web 2.0′.

The same thing is happening with green. Governments and people around the world recognised the importance of saving energy and cutting carbon. A lot of technologies and businesses emerged as a result of reduced technology costs. In China, for example, there was a boom of solar panel producers. Now, everything that saves 1% energy cost or 2% carbon can be called ‘green’. Green doesn’t mean anything any more, it is simply a trend.

Let’s take a look at what is happening in these cases.

At the beginning in the red circle new technologies emerge, and start to become cost effective for businesses to adopt. Next in the green, businesses start adopting these technologies more agressively, they become integrated together, new paradigms emerge and people find new ways to innovate and use the technology. In the purple, the analysts, companies like Gartner and IDC, identify these emerging trends and give them a name. Finally, in the blue, the marketing departments of companies grab the name and go crazy with it, as the whole world of technology explodes in excitement about this new trend.

Above we see some of the technologies and trends that have lead to the explosion of cloud. However I believe what has happened in Cloud is that marketing people now use the word ‘cloud’ to define not one, but a very general and unspecific set of different trends, such as virtualization, on-demand IT, desktop virtual desktops, and big data. Technology reporter and friend Navin Kabra from Pune, India, writes in his recent article about Apple’s iCloud ‘…by now the term “Cloud Computing” or “Cloud” has become so diluted as to be essentially meaningless.’ His point is a valid one. Cloud now describes so many different trends that even the IDC and US government’s formal definitions of Cloud don’t really help any more. It is not important to argue about what Cloud is, but instead to recognise and accept that it covers a number of different trends.

Soon we are going to stop being interested in using Cloud as an ‘umbrella term’ for a number of technologies, applications and trends, in the same way ‘Web 2.0’ is no longer a popular or useful tech term. We can begin now, by using more specific terms such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to describe what we really mean. However these three alone are not enough to cover all the new ‘Cloud’ technologies which are emerging. For example, is Apple’s iCloud ‘IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS’? Clearly it’s not IaaS or SaaS, and it’s not really a full platform either, it’s more like a storage platform or ‘Sync-as-a-Service’, a new dimension in the cloud game. And what about other services such as backup and voice as a service? These will soon be offered entirely as an elastic service: ‘Backup-as-a-Service’, ‘Voice-as-Service’.

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Gartner has a well known ‘hype cycle’ curve which currently has Cloud perched neatly on top, ready for downfall. Does this mean the market will dry up and suddenly there will be no demand for IaaS – enabling technology, SaaS, Cloud Sync, big data, and other so-called cloud technology? Unlikely, I think, instead it will signal the end of the hype, and time for meaningful words, business models and technologies to emerge and grow strongly from 2012  through 2020. So perhaps we can start re-thinking how we use the word ‘Cloud’ now and stop trying to answer impossible questions like ‘What is Cloud Computing?’.

Now we can return to Charleston’s billion dollar question: “How big will the Cloud Market become?” and turn it into a meaningful one for his organisation, like: “How will trends in IT-as-a-service drive network equipment growth?”. With specific questions like this we can create meaningful answers which help build solid intelligence.

Questions such as ‘How big is Cloud?’ and ‘What is Cloud?’ are now only really useful from a marketing standpoint. Engineers and business leaders need to stay focussed and define what these cloud trends and technoligies really mean to their business, and how they can take advantage of them. The age of cloud hype is coming to an end, the real work is beginning, and businesses need to decide where to focus. The key is not to pay too much attention to the purple and blue circles in the diagram which represent the trends, hype and marketing terms of technology, and instead to keep focussed on the real benefits and applications of those technologies. Only in this way can businesses that want to take advantage of this paradigm shift in IT succeed. Next time someone asks you ‘What is Cloud?’, rather than confuse them with your own interpretation of Cloud, perhaps you can engage them with this answer: “First tell me about what your business does, tell me how you use information and technology, and I’ll tell how cloud computing can benefit you.”

Our media company, China-Cloud.com, asked me to write a piece targeted at university students considering entrepreneurship. It will be translated into Chinese (not by me!) and put on the website soon. Below is the original article in English:

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I want to begin by saying I don’t really believe in giving advice, but unfortunately I’m not yet wise enough to follow my own advice. Two years ago, in June 2009, I was preparing to leave India after spending almost two years there working on a web startup and then a service company I started with my German-Taiwanese friend from university. It had been a roller coaster of a time, not without difficulties, and packed full of valuable learning experiences. Even though my time left in India was limited, and there was a lot to do at my company (I was CTO), I wanted to reach out to local Indian students about to graduate and give one last presentation. In India I used to teach English to orphaned children twice a week, and once a week teach a university course about The Web. Occasionally our team had the opportunity to give guest lectures to students, inspiring them to be entrepreneurial and consider a different career path. Alas, time and circumstances were not on my side, and I left India before I had a chance to deliver my presentation. Two years later I find myself in China, still in the startup world, and still eager to share my thoughts as a young entrepreneur. So here is what I wanted to say, here are four simple tips for Business and Life:

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1. “It’s one thing to know the path, but quite another to walk the path”.

This is a quote one of my most respected mentors, Richard Rhor, an American priest and philosopher. It is also a disclaimer for the remainder of my tips! Most young people including me, and many older ones get very excited about knowing the right stuff. In my experience, nowadays knowledge is worth very little without experience. To get experience, we must walk the path. Many of the things we haven’t learned yet, and some things we think we have, will not fully reveal themselves until we get out there and try it out. In my experience it’s the people who actually walk out into the world and engage with it, that really get what they want. It’s easy to know what the right thing to do is. It’s hard get your head down and actually do it.

When you take a risk and do something, opportunities pop up that you never expected; you learn things you never even knew you had to learn.

2. Success is doing what you love to do, every day.

I believe the world we live in today makes it really difficult for people to be successful. First of all, we start off thinking success is all about having money and being famous. Maybe you still believe that. That’s because the TV and movies and magazines make us think that we should aspire to be like the people we see in them. Although I’m young I’ve been able to meet many people who are rich, and some who are famous, but these are not the most successful people I’ve met. Truly successful people do what they do because they’re passionate about it, and sometimes that leads them to get rich, but it’s not the reason they do it. Apple made $65bn revenue in 2010. Do you think Steve Jobs started Apple for money, or that he works hard for fame? Of course not! He is simply passionate about creating perfect products that are simple and beautiful, yet very clever. I also know many people who are successful but not rich at all, they do simple jobs like teaching or farming, but they love their work. Secondly, discovering what you love doing is very hard, because most organisations today aren’t very good at letting you discover and use your real talents. So you need to work very hard to discover what you’re good at, even harder to make sure you can do what you’re good at for the rest of your life. Starting a business or working in a startup is one good way to learn what you like because there are always new challenges and opportunities to do something new.

Success is discovering what you’re really good at, and finding a way to do it every day.

3. Management and leadership are different things.

A great organisation needs both, but it is important to understand the difference. If you are planning to start up or do a new project, you need to know what leadership is and know how to pick great leaders to work with. In a traditional business, the big boss picks managers who have other managers report to them, and everyone has strictly defined roles, responsibilities, and people they report to. In a traditional business the organisational chart is very important, and is usually shaped like a pyramid. But people who have great leadership skills do more than tell people what to do and report to their boss. These ‘leaders’ care about the goals of the company. They are not afraid to share information with their team and encourage ideas from everyone. They take risks and do things without asking. They are open minded and easily adapt to new situations. They are not afraid to share ideas with everyone and speak out when they think something is wrong in the organisation. They admit when they are wrong and they fix things quickly. They never complain or gossip. Most of all, they inspire their team and other leaders to cooperate and achieve goals together.

Why is leadership so important in this day and age? It’s not just a cool new way of doing management. People with great leadership skills are required more than ever in modern companies because of business expectations and employee expectations. In todays business environment, especially in the technology sector, markets and demands change quickly, innovations happen fast and only good leaders can adapt quickly and lead their team to success. Also, today employees expect better managers and better teams, and it is very easy for them to change jobs if they aren’t satisfied. How many times have you heard someone say ‘I left my company because of my boss’ or ‘I don’t like the culture of the company’? Today employees care who they work for. There is a global company with 20,000 employees that has an almost flat organisational structure, every week the company founders speak to everyone via live video conference, and engineers can spend 20% of their time on their own personal projects. It’s name? Google.

Sure, things get done in a management focussed organisation, but the leading businesses of today’s world are built by people who understand the importance of great leadership.

4. People are everything.

The Chinese know this better than anyone else! It’s all about people. Business, entrepreneurship, teams, even great ideas and technologies. Friends often come to me to ask for startup advise, and immediately start talking about their great idea. The problem is, a great idea is not worth anything without people to build it, people to manage it, people to fund it, people to sell it, and people who will buy it. We entrepreneurs often get carried away with a great new technology, and forget that it’s people who are our most important asset. Did you know most venture capitalists place much higher value on the people in the team than on the idea or the business plan? Great people are not always your friends or people who are like you either. It’s important to have a good mix of people with different backgrounds and skills in any team. Of course simply finding good people is not enough, you need to attract them, and they need to want to work with you, buy from you and invest in you. If you want to start up, being a tolerant, humble, happy person is very important. All the successful people I know are nice to others, and fun to be around.

To be successful, identify great people, attract them, and work with them.

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Neither business or life is easy. There are no quick tips or ‘Top 10′ lists which solve real life problems. The best thing advise like this can do is give you a glimpse of what is still left to be learned, but I believe the only way to really learn something is to actually doing it. Even I don’t fully understand because I still have a lot left to do! One thing I do know is that standing up and doing something difficult will open doors to you that you never knew existed. As 20th century Scottish explorer William Hutchinson Murray says:

” The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves as well. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents, meetings and material assistance that no one could have dreamed would come their way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. ”

William Hutchinson Murray, 1951

Jack Ma, Robin Li, and my chairman Edward Tian, are among those who understand this statement better than anyone. They got out there, found something they’re passionate about, attracted great people, and just did it. Good luck!