Song information On this page you can find the lyrics of the song Steve Jobs, artist - Steve Aoki. Album song Steve Jobs, in the genre
Date of issue: 28.05.2012
Record label: Ultra
Song language: English
Steve Jobs |
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 sans 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 10 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 backward 10 years later |