Something in my Twitter feed caught my attention today:
RT @macworld: Our deepest condolences to the friends & family of VMware engineer Vinay Venkatesh (@djgraphite), who died today at age of 29.
— TUAW (@TUAW) November 2, 2009
Intrigued, I visited the Twitter account of the now deceased Vinay Venkatesh (apparently he was involved in a motorcycle crash and passed away during surgery), and the last tweet was this:
Time to Open Source a project I worked on a long time ago. I should clean it up and make sure it still works though. #weekendprojects
— Vinay (@djgraphite) October 30, 2009
What’s scary is that the tweet just shows him going about his daily life, and then the next thing we know, he’s moved on. I mean, seriously, it could happen to anyone, including yourself. It’s scary to realize how vulnerable and unpredictable our lives are, how easily it can be snuffed out like a candle.
To quote Steve Jobs in his Stanford Commencement Address
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.
Did Vinay Venkatesh go about doing what he would do if he knew it was the last day of his life? What about myself? Looking back, I guess I would have answered “No” to that question for almost everyday in the past few months. But yet, can I really change anything?
And that’s the scariest thing.