Tebow performance: Filling in for the ineffective Kyle Orton in the second half, Tebow nearly rallies Denver to a victory over the Chargers.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "That was adorable. But if John Fox listens to these stupid Denver fans and starts Tebow in a game next week, he needs to have his head examined."
Haterus Tebowis population: 150 million
Week 7
Tebow performance: After going 4-for-14 for 40 yards to put the Broncos behind 15-0 with 5:23 to play, Tebow leads Denver to an 18-15 overtime victory at Miami.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Big deal. He beat the Dolphins. They stink. And if Tebow wasn't so terrible, Denver never would have been trailing in the first place."
Haterus Tebowis population: 145 million
Week 8
Tebow performance: The Broncos lose 45-10 at home to the Lions, as Tebow throws 39 passes, completing just 18.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Ha! See? We told you! This guy is nothing but a fullback. And he doesn't even throw well for a fullback."
Haterus Tebowis population: 150 million
Week 9
Tebow performance: Running an offense designed more for his unique abilities, Tebow throws for two touchdowns and runs for 113 yards as the Broncos score 31 second-half points to beat Oakland 38-24.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Oooh! Now he has wins against the Dolphins and Raiders. Fancy! And it's not like he had anything to do with the win anyway. Willis McGahee ran for 163 yards and two touchdowns. This winning is not going to last."
Haterus Tebowis population: 145 million
Week 10
Tebow performance: Tebow goes 2-for-8, and Denver beats the Chiefs 17-10.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "What a joke. He's embarrassing the NFL. I mean, 2-for-8? So pathetic. If it wasn't for Denver's defense, Tebow would be nothing. So now he has wins against the Dolphins, Raiders and Chiefs. Big deal. Wait until he has to play a real defense next week when the Jets come to town."
Haterus Tebowis population: 140 million
Week 11
Tebow performance: Tebow makes a 20-yard touchdown run with 58 seconds left to cap a 95-yard drive, giving the Broncos a 17-13 win over the Jets.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "The Jets are so overrated. How do you let Tim Tebow go 95 yards on you? They should be ashamed of themselves."
Haterus Tebowis population: 100 million
Week 12
Tebow performance: Tebow throws for 143 yards and a touchdown and runs for 67 yards as Denver beats San Diego 16-13 in overtime.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Another week, another game in which Tebow gets credit for the accomplishments of Von Miller and the Denver defense. What a joke."
Haterus Tebowis population: 90 million
Week 13
Tebow performance: Despite a poor performance by a Denver defense playing without Von Miller, the Broncos win 35-32 on a last-second field goal. Tebow's passing leads Denver's offense in the second half, and he finishes the game 10-for-15 for 202 yards and two touchdowns.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Shut up."
Haterus Tebowis population: 75 million
Based on the previous eight weeks, science allows us to accurately predict the remainder of the season.
Week 14
Tebow performance: The Broncos crush a depleted Bears team.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "So Tebow gets credit now for injuring Jay Cutler and Matt Forte?"
Haterus Tebowis population: 60 million
Week 15
Tebow performance: Tebow answers a late Tom Brady drive that gives New England a four-point lead with 1:30 remaining by engineering an 85-yard touchdown drive to give Denver a last-second win.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "So Tebow has now beaten one top quarterback. That's it. Only one. And Brady isn't even the best quarterback in the league anymore. Aaron Rodgers would totally kill Tebow."
Haterus Tebowis population: 30 million
Week 16
Tebow performance: The Broncos clinch the AFC West title with a win over the Bills.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Of course they did. Tebow is so lousy, the AFC West is the only division he could ever hope to win. Tebow and the AFC West both suck equally."
Haterus Tebowis population: 15 million
Week 17
Tebow performance: Tebow and other Broncos starters are rested for the playoffs during the second half of Denver's regular-season finale against the Chiefs. Backup Brady Quinn throws a touchdown pass in the fourth quarter.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "See! They can even win with Brady Quinn. Tebow is just lucky to be on a stacked Denver team."
Haterus Tebowis population: 5 million
Wild-card round
Tebow performance: A last-minute touchdown run by Tebow leads Denver into the divisional round.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "You're supposed to win home playoff games. This proves nothing."
Haterus Tebowis population: 1 million
Divisional round
Tebow performance: The Broncos knock off the AFC's top seed on the road.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "No one remembers divisional-round wins. Win a Super Bowl, or history will forget you.
Haterus Tebowis population: 100,000
AFC Championship Game
Tebow performance: Tebow leads a second-half comeback as the Broncos advance to the Super Bowl.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Good. This is what I wanted to happen all along. I want everyone in the country to see Tebow get humiliated by Aaron Rodgers. It's going to be awesome. I've never been so excited for a Super Bowl."
Haterus Tebowis population: 100
Super Bowl
Tebow performance: Tebow throws for 472 yards and six touchdowns to outduel Rodgers, and Denver wins the Super Bowl.
Haterus Tebowis comments: "Looks like we have a new worst quarterback to ever win a Super Bowl."
Haterus Tebowis population: Just one guy: Aaron Rodgers
Below paraphrased from Chapter Fifteen, "The Launch"
When Apple's "1984" commercial was screened by Apple's board before it was to be played at the Super Bowl, the board was aghast at the ad. So Apple's board asked Chiat/Day to sell off the two commercial spots. Steve Jobs was beside himself--so when Wozniak was strolling the Macintosh building, Jobs pulled him over, and played the ad in a VCR. Wozniak asked how much the ad would cost. Jobs said $800,000. Woz said he would pay for half of the ad if Steve would also. Chiat/Day then told Apple , (in an act of defiance) that they couldn't see the 60 second spot, and the ad ran.
The ad was eventually selected by TV Guide and Advertising Age as the greatest commercial of all time.
It just shows that misplaced conventional wisdom doesn't only exist among the NFL pundits!
Darrell Revis of the Jets, said before the game, that "he wasn't concerned about Tebow's legs" and that "the biggest thing for the secondary is for us to not fall asleep." At the end of the game, it was Revis who was sleepwalking in order to avoid a hit!
With a little more than a minute left in the game, Tebow, on a run, instead of stepping out bounds, barrels towards Darrelle Revis, 24, who makes "a business decision" and decides to step away, from getting hit by the Tebow locomotive! See at 3:46 in the above clip.
After the game, a reporter asked Tebow, "Was there any thought about sliding or stepping out of bounds on that last play?" And his reply, with a laugh was, "No sir. No sir."
But it just wasn't Revis. How about the Jets other defensive back, Antonio Cromartie, 31, freezing in the end zone, at the end of Tebow's winning TD run? He looked like a deer in the headlights, making "a business decision" like his teammate Revis did!
But it wasn't just the Jets players. How about Hugh Douglas of ESPN? As Tebow ended his presser last night with this: “I probably will tweet [former NFL defensive end] Hugh Douglas because I did hear that he said if we won he was going to church on Sunday. So I’m going to tweet him. He better be in his Sunday best! I hope he can sing praise and worship, too. So we’ll see.”
God Bless!
Tebow polarizing? Last night, after the game, and the 95 yard touchdown drive,, where Tebow walked on water, you couldn't even read the comment boards on ESPN, as the servers weren't fast enough to take all the comments that were furiously coming in!
He's getting some believers. Von Miller, who just had a crazy, great game, had his to say about Tebow:
"I've said it before: I trust him," rookie endbacker Von Miller said. "I trust him with everything. No matter how many interceptions he throws, no matter how many touchdowns he throws, that's Tim Tebow. I'm going to ride with him until the end.
"I hope he shut up a whole bunch of critics today."
Von Miller now puts fear back in the Denver D!
Tebow also had a perfect answer to one of the most most selfish players in the NFL, Michael Irvin, after the game:
How is he polarizing, when you have a Dad's daughter, putting signs like this up at the Bronco games?
Or a bride, Tebowing!
Maybe its just this that polarizes!
God Bless!!
Or this, when Tebow, at the end of the last three Bronco games, takes a knee!
God Bless!!
"Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven."
Vic Gundotra talks about Steve Jobs attention to detail:
One Sunday morning, January 6th, 2008 I was attending religious services when my cell phone vibrated. As discreetly as possible, I checked the phone and noticed that my phone said "Caller ID unknown". I choose to ignore.
After services, as I was walking to my car with my family, I checked my cell phone messages. The message left was from Steve Jobs. "Vic, can you call me at home? I have something urgent to discuss" it said.
Before I even reached my car, I called Steve Jobs back. I was responsible for all mobile applications at Google, and in that role, had regular dealings with Steve. It was one of the perks of the job.
"Hey Steve - this is Vic", I said. "I'm sorry I didn't answer your call earlier. I was in religious services, and the caller ID said unknown, so I didn't pick up".
Steve laughed. He said, "Vic, unless the Caller ID said 'GOD', you should never pick up during services".
I laughed nervously. After all, while it was customary for Steve to call during the week upset about something, it was unusual for him to call me on Sunday and ask me to call his home. I wondered what was so important?
"So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I've already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow" said Steve.
"I've been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I'm not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn't have the right yellow gradient. It's just wrong and I'm going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?"
Of course this was okay with me. A few minutes later on that Sunday I received an email from Steve with the subject "Icon Ambulance". The email directed me to work with Greg Christie to fix the icon.
Since I was 11 years old and fell in love with an Apple II, I have dozens of stories to tell about Apple products. They have been a part of my life for decades. Even when I worked for 15 years for Bill Gates at Microsoft, I had a huge admiration for Steve and what Apple had produced.
But in the end, when I think about leadership, passion and attention to detail, I think back to the call I received from Steve Jobs on a Sunday morning in January. It was a lesson I'll never forget. CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.
To one of the greatest leaders I've ever met, my prayers and hopes are with you Steve.
Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford in 2005---one of the best ever. In that speech, he said this,
"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."
The entire speech:
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.
A strip falling off the AC Convention Center? The petals on flowers didn't even blow off, but the aged and infirmed were told to evacuate to "safer" quarters because of Irene's threat.
