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,
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 backward ten years later.