Do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. Benjamin Franklin

Welcome to The Art of The Impossible, the weekly newsletter where I unearth five pieces of content which I hope will both inspire and embolden you.

When I was in the depths of working in startups, I always wished I could find some respite and inspiration on my weekends, and this newsletter is the thing I wish existed so I do hope you enjoy it.

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by the wonderful team at Descript - the product I use to edit all my podcast episodes with ease - sign up for FREE here.

PODCAST

Michael Dell vs. Wall Street: Dorm Room to Billion-Dollar Battles

I enjoyed this podcast episode on the James Altucher show where he interviews Michael Dell - founder and CEO of Dell Technologies.

From James’ show notes: I remember in college, hearing about this kid who was building computers in his dorm and making millions. I thought it was a myth. It wasn’t. He’s the real thing—and he just kept going.

I wanted to understand what drove him, what it felt like to deal with Carl Icahn trying to wrestle his company from him, and what success feels like after decades of being in the game. Also: I had to ask why Dell didn’t invent Google. That, plus how he’s now thinking about AI, cancer, and what “focus” really means.

In this episode, they go back in time and talk about the early days of Dell - from building computers in a college dorm room to defending his company against Carl Icahn and taking the company private.

Dell shares how early obsession with tech (and pulling things apart to see how things work) and business turned into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise, the lessons he’s learned about leadership, and how he’s positioning for the future with AI, cybersecurity, and gene tech on the horizon.

This is more than a business story. It’s about risk, conviction, reinvention—and knowing when to walk away… from Steve Jobs.

What You’ll Learn:

• How Dell’s dorm-room business scaled to $80,000/month before he even left college

• What Michael Dell really thought during his showdown with Carl Icahn

• Why most big companies fail to innovate—and how to keep a startup mindset

• How Dell Technologies is preparing for the explosion in AI and edge computing

• What makes a good leader at the head of a $100 billion company

Listen to the full episode here.

QUOTE

I had the honour of interviewing Mary Lou Jepsen a couple of years ago on the podcast (listen here). Mary Lou is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, pioneer in VR, medical imaging and telepathic technology, former professor at MIT Media Lab and currently, founder of Openwater.

Mary Lou spent many of her childhood years unwell before she was finally diagnosed with a brain tumour in her twenties. And going through that had a huge impact on her life as you might expect. For the many years she was quite literally dying, she decided she only wanted to work on really interesting projects - as she says to me in this interview, “I never really thought I would live very long and so I wanted to find really interesting things to do with my life for however long I might live.” Listen to her story here.

“I never really thought I would live very long and so I wanted to find really interesting things to do with my life for however long I might live.”

INTERVIEW

Demis Hassabis Embraces the Future of Work in the Age of AI

A short interview from Steven Levy at Wired with DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis where they discuss AI, AGI and what we could/should be worried about when it comes to its potential.

If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era. AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources. If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030.

Read the full interview here.

BOOK

From the Laboratory to the Moon: The Quiet Genius of George R. Carruthers by David H. DeVorkin

It feels like every week, I learn about a wonderful innovator whose story has yet to reach mass media. One such case is American physicist and engineer, George Robert Carruthers. Hopefully this book will change that.

In April 1972, as George Carruthers closely monitored the operation from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, astronauts conducting the Apollo 16 mission positioned a gold-plated far ultraviolet electrographic camera on the moon. The camera, Carruthers's invention, was the first astronomical observatory on the lunar surface, where it stands to this day. While Carruthers's achievements earned many accolades, including the President's Medal for Technology and Invention, surprisingly little is known about this remarkable man.

In From the Laboratory to the Moon, David DeVorkin explores Carruthers's life and work, for the first time telling the full story of how a deeply reserved African American farm boy rose to become one of our most celebrated aerospace scientists.

DeVorkin follows Carruthers from his childhood in Ohio and then Chicago to his career at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. In the highly competitive world of space science in the 1960s and 1970s, Carruthers's genius for experimentation and exploration transcended the racial stereotyping and discrimination of his day, and he achieved world-class recognition for his studies of the Earth and deep space. A leading expert in the history of astronomy and space science, DeVorkin gives a deft account of these achievements and of how Carruthers used the fame they brought him, along with his notoriety as a Black man in science, to become a tireless advocate for underserved young people in science and engineering.

Buy the book here.

WATCH

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

To mark 20 years since Steve Jobs’ now-famous Stanford University commencement address, the Steve Jobs Archive are releasing a newly enhanced video - if you haven’t already seen it, it is well-worth your time.

Watch the enhanced video of Steve’s talk here.

Read more about the speech and how Steve prepared for it here.

Transcript here:

I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And 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 six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why’d I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed 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’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.”

My biological mother found out later 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 go to college. This was the start in my life.

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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with. And I would walk the seven 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 sans-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 that 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. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.

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 ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.

We just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I’d 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. And 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’d 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 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 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’s gonna hit 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 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—and 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. 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 wanna 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 doctors’ code for “Prepare to die.”

It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten 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 thankfully 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’s 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’s 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 sixties, 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, 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.

As always, thank you so much for reading this newsletter and for listening to the podcast. If you have a minute spare, I would so appreciate a review of the pod or a heart on this newsletter - both help others to find it and my goal is to inspire as many people as possible with the stories I share.

Thank you and I hope you have a lovely weekend.

Danielle

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