During freshman and sophomore year I had a teacher, Mr. VanGronigen, who at the end of each year handed us a packet of quotes and Steve Jobs’s iconic 2005 Stanford commencement address. Jobs structured his speech in three distinct stories; his concluding story concerned death. In this story Jobs articulated how the imminent prospect of death caused by his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer led him to live a life where he envisioned everyday to be his last. The sempiternal thought of departure empowers me to wake up everyday and to live my life as if it were my last day on earth. Perhaps it’s an egotistical tangent of legacy, or the cogitation of leaving the world regret-filled, or a cocktail of both. Death motivates us to act, it forces us
