Connecting the Dots

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs spoke to the grad­u­at­ing class of Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. This is the first part of a speech that made a great impres­sion on me when I first read it. Great read!

By Steve Jobs

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. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My bio­log­i­cal mother was a young, unwed col­lege 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 have an unex­pected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.”

My bio­log­i­cal mother later found out 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 some­day go to college.

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 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. And here I was spend­ing all of the money my par­ents had saved their entire life. 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 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 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¢ 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. 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 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, its 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.

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.