Steve Jobs - an Entrepreneur,
personal computer revolutionist, Inventor, Founder of Pixar Animation Studios and
co-founder of the techie giant Apple.
His speech in 2005 at
Stanford University is one of the greatest inspirational speeches ever
delivered.
Here it is:
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.
To be contd.....
To be contd.....
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