Papa Rich Wee
Gary North’s Reality Check shared his perspective about Steve Jobs at Stanford in his Issue 1109 dated Oct 14, 2011. I like this writeup and wish to share with my readers… Good entertainment reading that teaches us something about life.. Thank you..
STEVE JOBS AT STANFORD
Part 1: Faith in a Godless Providence
INTRODUCTION
Sometime in 2004, a Stanford University official
compiled a list of potential speakers for the 2005
graduation speech. Every college goes through this
exercise. The ideal candidate has these characteristics:
(1) rich. (2) famous, (3) not a college graduate, (4) a
good speaker, (5) available; (6) cheap.
Why these characteristics? (1) He might give a large
donation. (2) Fame justifies offering the invitation, and
it will impress the alumni, who may give donations. (3) The
speaker may be so impressed with the invitation that he
will accept it. (4) He will not make a fool of himself and
therefore the university. (5) He will show up. (6) Self-
evident.
The official narrowed down the list and sent it up the
chain of command. Steve Jobs’ name was on the list. Someone
high up in the chain persuaded the president of Stanford to
send Jobs an invitation. Entrepreneurially speaking, this
turned out to be one of the greatest decisions in
commencement speech history.
Jobs competently delivered a great speech. It was
arguably the greatest commencement speech ever. It is
surely the most viewed commencement speech ever. The
Stanford University version has had almost 11 million hits
on YouTube. Another version has had over 6 million hits. It
was posted by someone identifying himself — I presume
“himself” — as peestandingup, and this act of posting is
probably the most significant thing that Mr. Up will ever
do.
The video is 15 minutes long, which is just about
right for a commencement address.
Printed out, it is two and a half pages long. Again, this
is just right. You can read it in a few minutes.
http://bit.ly/JobsAtStanfordText
It had three points. These were three very relevant
points, especially for a group of several thousand
graduates of one of the world’s most prestigious and
expensive universities.
His introduction to his speech was flawless on paper.
In delivering it, he had a brief case of the “uhs,” but as
soon as he got rolling, they disappeared. Here is how he
began.
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.
With these words, he followed the standard protocol
for a commencement address. (1) He congratulated them for
having survived the intellectual ordeal of college. (2) He
congratulated their parents for having survived the
financial ordeal of college. (3) He played humble when in
fact he was more accomplished than any of them will ever
be. (4) He offered what every graduating audience wants to
hear: a few brief stories that might possibly be relevant
in their lives.
I begin where he did: with Story #1. He announced:
“The first story is about connecting the dots.”
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.”
He began his career with the same decision that two
other titans of the microcomputer era also made: dropping
out in their first year of college and never going back.
Bill Gates did this. So did Michael Dell.
His story was different. He was an adopted child. His
biological mother had wanted the adopting parents to be
college graduates. His were not. They got her to sign the
papers by promising to send him to college. He chose the
wrong 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.”
He cared about his parents, or so he implies. In any
case, he quit. Had he gone to a community college and then
to a tax-funded, low-tuition university, he might have
graduated. He would have gone on to achieve conventional
things in a better-than-average way. We would never have
heard of him. I say this as a Calvinist who believes in
predestination. He would have agreed with me. His first
story is about providence. He just did not believe in God.
He remained at Reed, taking advantage of a course that
hardly anyone could use: calligraphy.
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.
That some Reed College parents were paying a fortune
to have their children study calligraphy is typical of
higher education, which quietly and unofficially sells
itself as necessary for success in the world and then
indulges its faculty members, who get paid well for
teaching non-practical courses.
Jobs fooled them. He made the course practical. But
not at first. Calligraphy was to prove crucial later on in
his career.
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’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 backwards ten years
later.
As a speaker, Jobs achieved what few speakers ever
achieve in a major speech. He provided a hook on which the
listeners could hang their hats. This was not just
a key word. It was a key example. It let the audience
have a mental picture to reinforce a verbal argument. This
is very hard for a speaker to do, I assure you. Calligraphy
illustrated a point — the central point in Story 1.
THE POWER OF PROVIDENCE
Here, Jobs came to the crucial issue: the meaning of
life. To understand life, you must connect the dots. By
this he meant the chronological facts that make up a life.
Out of them come relevance. But we can see this relevance
only in retrospect, he told the students emeriti.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking
forward; you can only connect them looking
backwards. So you have to trust that the dots
will somehow connect in your future. You have to
trust in something — your gut, destiny, life,
karma, whatever. This approach has never let me
down, and it has made all the difference in my
life.
But why? Why should the dots have relevance? He took a
seemingly peripheral set of dots — days spent studying
calligraphy — and came up with retrospective meaning.
This retroactive assessment was imputed by Jobs to the
chronological dots. But how relevant was this to the world
at large? Did aesthetically pleasing type fonts really make
a big difference in the coming of the microcomputer era?
Could he prove this? I doubt it. But, in his life,
aesthetics were crucial. He stood almost alone in this
faith. He built Apple in terms of it. He got rich in terms
of it: the fusion of technology with aesthetics.
I contend that type fonts are peripheral to computers
generally. They are not useless, but they are peripheral.
They are icing on the digital cake. I am typing this in
Courier font, which looks more like a typewriter font than
any other font. But I am well aware that aesthetics are not
peripheral to Apple products. That is probably why I do not
use Apple products. I prefer plain old text. I am a text
man. I am a dinosaur with digits. I am typing this on a
1984 PC/AT keyboard. I have eight others just like it.
The computer engineer would say that Jobs liked
calligraphy at age 18 because he was hard wired to
appreciate aesthetics. The software programmer would say he
was programmed. I say he was predestinated.
Jobs was fired by the board at Apple in 1985 because
his aesthetics got ahead of the available low-cost
technology. He was hired back in 1997 when technology had
caught up. It took Apple stock at $5 a share and likely to
head lower to persuade the board to swallow its pride and
put him in charge again. They got rich because they did.
Jobs drew a conclusion in 2005. “You have to trust
that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have
to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma,
whatever.” For him, God was relegated to “whatever.” That
was epistemologically appropriate for 21-year-olds who were
about to graduate from Stanford. This is the prevailing
epistemology of modern academia: God is “whatever.” He is
not part of the curriculum, except as “whatever.”
God can be trusted as the whatever who resides in
between life’s dots. He shares this undefined and
undefinable kingdom with your gut, destiny, life, and
karma. Problem: none of this is part of any curriculum at
universities that charge $50,000 a year: tuition, room,
board, and textbooks. Gut, destiny, life, karma, and
whatever are extra-curricular activities, even off-campus-
only activities — not in the same league as football
games, keg parties, and that unique buddy system that
modern campuses offer. (http://bit.ly/CollegiateBuddies)
HELPING HANDS ALONG THE WAY
Jobs’ discovery of calligraphy was made possible by
the kindness of others.
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-cent 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.
In following the dots of his days spent as what he
called a drop-in, Jobs became a moocher. That is a
pejorative term. He was a bum. A leech. He was absorbing
free sleeping space, free food at the Hare Krishna temple,
and free information as an auditor at a very expensive
college.
In society, there is charity. Jobs was famous for not
giving charity, yet his career path depended on it.
People let him mooch. They saw that he was not wasting
his time, so they went out of their way to sustain him in
his quest. He followed his dream. But there is no such
thing as a free lunch. Whatever he achieved in life was the
product of other people’s faith in him.
Why would anyone have faith in him? Why didn’t they
say this? “Get a night job, Jobs. Pay your own way.” That
was their prerogative. But they treated him more kindly,
less demandingly. They cut him some slack.
They did what he never did in business relations. They
did what he never did in private, as far as we know. If he
gave away money in private, fine. His right hand did not
know what his left hand was doing. I am willing to admit
that he may have had a generous side. But he never publicly
promoted charitable giving.
He barely perceived in his speech to those eager ex-
students that his life was a gigantic contradiction. His
success in business seemed to be based on words and actions
that would have kept him from connecting the dots in his
drop-in phase of life.
In this sense, Steve Jobs was one of the most morally
blind, highly successful men in history. There have been
self-consciously evil famous men. There have been power-
seekers, wealth-seekers, and sex-seekers. The triumvirate
of money, sex, and power have lured many men to their doom.
But Jobs was different. He pursued the combination of
aesthetics and high technology with a passion.
He connected digits in connecting his life’s dots. But
he never honored the origin of those dots. They came from
something other than his gut (instinct, intuition),
destiny (impersonal), life (common), karma (impersonal).
They came from the kindness of others.
By many accounts, Steve Jobs was a mean, ruthless SOB.
He was the living incarnation of the opposite of those
people who gave him his start in life, beginning with his
parents, who sacrificed for his education.
That was the great tragedy of Steve Jobs. He was
productive as few men ever are. He was driven internally —
by what? — to serve customers well. As a driven man, he
drove others. But at the start of his career were people
who were not driven and who did not drive him. They let him
follow his gut. They let him connect the dots at his
leisure and their expense. Those forgotten people —
unknown to us, but not by God — made possible his success.
Read the testimony again. Look for the central word.
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-cent 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.
The central word is “I.” This was the paradox of Steve
Jobs’ life. It was all “I,” yet to build up his own ego, he
had to serve customers.
——————————————————-
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——————————————————-
CONCLUSION
The free market made possible his economic success.
The free society made possible his early life as a moocher.
Voluntarism was at the heart of Steve Jobs’ success.
He absorbed others’ charity and returned the favor to
others, not as charity, but as profit-seeking output. This
economic system has made us all rich in the West, by any
standard of pre-1850 comparison. As P. J. O’Rourke put it,
“When you think of the good old days, think dentistry.'”
The free market is a moral system, not because it
makes men moral, but because it rewards those who serve
others efficiently and penalizes those who don’t.
Steve Jobs’ personal characteristics in his
economically productive years did not inspire the
development of those virtues which had made his early years
productive. In another economic system or social order,
Steve Jobs would have made a first-class tyrant. He was far
more Simon Legree than Uncle Tom. But the free market made
him a giant. It let his customers make him rich. It also
encouraged those who were under his verbal lash to keep on
working to meet his standards.
His customers did not pay him to be nice. They paid
him to deliver the goods, which he did. They did not feel
his lash. They plugged and played and enjoyed the fonts.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll buy an iPad3. It had better
allow the use of a PC/AT keyboard.
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