Steve Jobs: Truth Be Told About College
Not sure what major to study in college? What career path is best for you? Don’t worry, most people don’t know. Many pretend to know. Lots of people blow their family’s life savings on a degree they’ll never use. Colleges won’t tell you this, it’s not in their interest. You’ll probably never hear a college administrator say, “Don’t go. Take a gap year. Experiment. Wait until you’re more sure about who you are.”
The following is a true story told by Steve Jobs during his commencement speech at Stanford University in the spring of 2005. Steve Jobs realized that he didn’t have a clue about what to do with his life and was among the rare few college students willing to admit it. Rather than follow the herd . . . he followed his talents and intuition . . .
“Truth be told, I never graduated from college. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why’d I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed 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 the waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night, asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him?” They said, “Of course.”
My biological mother found out later that my [adoptive] mother had never graduated from college and that my [adoptive] father had never graduated from high school. She [biological mother] refused to sign the adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my [adoptive] parents promised I would go to college. This was the start of my life.
And 17 years later, I did go to college, but I naively chose a college that was almost expensive as Stanford. And, all of my working class parent’s savings was 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 the money they had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.
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 look far more 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 cents return 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 Hari 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 classes in the country. Throughout the campus, on every poster, every label, every drawer was beautiful 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 that 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 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma or whatever, because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path—and that will make all the difference.”
~Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)
