Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
"What's Interesting" Linfield College Convocation
September 2005
This past spring, Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford. As I’m sure most or all of you know, Steve Jobs is the co-founder and long-time CEO of Apple Computer. So he is the brains behind the Macintosh, and the Mac-everything else, the brains behind the iMac and iTunes and iPods and i-everything else; the brains behind Pixar and Next. He is, in short, one of the most powerful and influential human beings on the face of the earth.
In his commencement speech, he said the following:
“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. 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. 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, dropping out of Reed was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
Naturally, at Reed, this caught our attention, and soon became the source of a fair amount of good natured ribbing from other people.
In his speech, Jobs went on to explain why dropping out of Reed was a good thing:
“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. 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, it is likely that no personal computer would have them.”
So what shall we make of this? I can’t help noting, to begin with, that Jobs was in effect telling students who were just graduating from Stanford that they’d just wasted four years of their lives and perhaps 150 grand in tuition. Maybe not the most diplomatic thing to say. But there’s a larger issue here, and that concerns Jobs’s notion of what’s interesting and what isn’t interesting. My view is very, very different from his. Now since Jobs is truly a great man and I’m most emphatically not a great man – I’d characterize myself as kind of OK – you should probably listen to him, not me. But I’ll share my view anyway, since I think I’m right and he’s wrong.
