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:
hungry
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, its
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

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