CEO, Apple and Pixar animation

I’m honored to be with you today for [bad word] from one of the finest universities in the world. [bad word] be told, I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to college graduation. Today I want to tell you 3 stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal, just 3 stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots

I dropped out of Reed college after the first six month, 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 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 were on a 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 mother had never graduated from college, and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign final adoption papers. She only relented a few month later, when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life.

And seventeen 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 6 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 in their entire life. So I decided to drop out and [bad word] 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 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 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 Hari Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I’ve 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 [bad word] 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 the serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different [bad word]  about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in the 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 [bad word]  it all came back to me and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the [bad word] with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in into that symbol course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple type faces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no [bad word] would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and [bad word] might not have that wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forwards when I was at college, but it was very very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the d