How Did Steve Jobs Stumble Into His Life’s Work?

“What you are doing right now has within it the seeds of your life’s work. As you may have discovered, each time you get a new job you use many of the skills you have already developed. It is as if every job prepares you in some way for the next one. Every skill you acquire that you love using will be important as you follow your higher path. You may not understand why you took a job or developed a particular talent or ability, but the skills you have learned will be of value to you. Trust that what you are doing right now is helping you gain skills that will be used in your greater life’s work.”
—Sanaya Roman in Creating Money

When I read this quote, I immediately thought of Steve Job’s commencement speech at Stanford University—an oldie but goodie. Jobs discussed his college years when he dropped out of school to informally drop in on only the subjects that interested him. It may have seemed irresponsible at the time, but it seems like legend now. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

“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 did I drop out? 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 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 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 seven 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 sans 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. 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.”

(More discussion of this subject and speech is also covered in the chapter about Fearless Faith in Professional Destiny).

6 Comments February 7, 2011