David’s wife sent me an IM out of the blue this afternoon; a few short but uninformative lines of text got me all confused…
I was confused because we weren’t expecting to hear that David had just passed away. He was a good friend of Grace’s in Taiwan when they worked at Land Rover.
Everything happened so quickly. Within days of discovering the liver cancer, the disease rapidly took over everything. And he was gone.
We chatted a few times and thought one day I’d finally get to see this guy who loved cars so much and had an outlook about life firmly grounded with realistic expectations, not dreamy clouds like us artist types.
This reminded me of a quote from Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford:
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.
Coincidently, over this past weekend someone emailed me to thank me for making the speech available for download. And he asked specifically how I felt about this quote. I didn’t think much of it then. But David’s passing drove home an important point Steve Jobs outlined above — life is too short to waste doing what you don’t love doing.
So this is a farewell to David. And kudos to his grounded approach to life and everything else… something I should start looking into having turned 32 just yesterday…