This article is lifted from a speech of Steve Jobs as a guest speaker at a graduation ceremony of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, USA. He tells three inspiring stories to the graduating students.
Connecting the dots
Steve begins his story by saying he never graduated from college. Her mother was a young graduate student who put him up for adoption. At age 17, Steve chose Reed College, a very expensive school.
His adoptive parents had to spend all their savings on Steve’s tuition. After 6 months, however, he dropped out. He said, “It was one of the best decisions I ever made.” He dropped out of the uninteresting subjects and ‘dropped in’ only on the interesting ones.
One subject fascinated him, Calligraphy, although he did not how it would help his career in the future. It had no practical application in his life then. He realized years later that it was an important part of the software he would generate because it offered the study of fonts and creative typography required. Windows eventually copied Apple on its typography.
It was serendipity, stumbling ‘accidentally’ on precious things, that was an important part of Steve’s destiny. Ten years later, he realized he was ‘connecting the dots’ by accident. It all came back to him when he was designing the MacIntosh computer. He said, “If I had never dropped out, I would never have dropped in that Calligraphy class.”
Without knowing it, Steve became a pioneer of ‘selective education’, a new trend being experimented with by the out-of-the-box thinking of a few pioneering universities today.
Today, universities offer a flood of courses dumped on students, half of which are irrelevant to their lives. It took a rebel to defy the system. Focus was the key to Steve’s learning style. He said, “Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even if it leads you off the well-worn path.”
Loving and losing
In Steve’s second story, he says that, in ten years, Apple grew from a partnership in a garage to a two billion firm with 4,000 employees. In the middle of the storm, Steve was fired from the very company he started.
“I’ve been rejected but I was still ‘in love’ (with what he had done). And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but getting fired by Apple was the best thing that ever happened to me.” It was serendipity all over again.
In the next five years, Steve founded Pixar, a pioneer in computer animation firm that catapulted into the stratosphere. He returned to Apple which was interested in his new successes. “Sometimes, life is going to hit you with a brick in the face. Don’t lose faith. The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Indeed, loving saved Steve from losing.
Author’s comments on Steve’s second story. Steve was a rebel out-of-the-box dropout facing a bunch of seasoned Harvard-Yale-Oxford-cultured guys. They were like oil and water. The finest education became a problem for Apple after Steve left. It began losing heavily, and a resurrected dropout saved Apple from the mess the finest education made.
Death as a principle of life
Steve asked himself often in making hard decisions, “If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do? All external expectations, all pride, all fear or embarrassment of failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” Only then, Steve thought, could one escape the fear that one has something to lose.
Steve was diagnosed with incurable cancer of the pancreas and was told he would live for three to six months. But later, the doctors discovered he had a rare type of cancer that was curable.
The nearness of death helped Steve sift through what was meaningful and absurd in life.
He said, “Death is the destination we all share. No one escapes it. Death is the single best invention of life. 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 other people’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
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