Transcript for great speech

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.