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great speech
Duration:
15 minutes and 4 seconds
Country:
Japan
Language:
English
Genre:
Documentary
Views:
159
(33
embedded)
Posted by:
spiri on Nov 4, 2008
great speech
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Video Transcription
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- I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
- Truth be told, I never graduated from college.
- And 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 six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in
- for another 18 months or so before I really quit.
- So why'd 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, who 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 the final adoption papers.
- She only relented a few months later
- when my parents promised that I would go to college.
- This was the start in my life.
- 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 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 the money my parents had made their entire life.
- So I decided to drop out
- and trust that it would all work out okay.
- 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 romatic.
- 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 stumbled into, by following my curiousity 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 type faces
- 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 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's likely that no personal computer would have them.
- If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that 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 somehow the dots will connect in your future.
- You have to trust in something
- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
- because believing that the dots will connect down the road
- will give you the confidence to follow your heart
- even when it leads you off the well-worn path.
- and that will make all the difference.


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