Thursday, June 16, 2005
Commencements
An old anonymous poem goes:
The month of June is here again, and all across the land
The graduation speakers come to tell us where we stand.
We stand at Armageddon. We stand upon the brink.
We stand upon life's ocean where we'll swim or where we'll sink.
We stand upon life's threshold with lamps all brightly lit.
And in the midst of all this standing, we sit, and sit, and sit.
It seems commencement speeches are well-known for being long and not very helpful. Hard on the seat and boring on the mind. If you want to read one that is more enjoyable, go here. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer gives his thoughts on his own life for the graduates of Stanford University this year. His personal story is encouraging and shows how the most unlikely experiences can be the ones that make a big difference. For instance:
The month of June is here again, and all across the land
The graduation speakers come to tell us where we stand.
We stand at Armageddon. We stand upon the brink.
We stand upon life's ocean where we'll swim or where we'll sink.
We stand upon life's threshold with lamps all brightly lit.
And in the midst of all this standing, we sit, and sit, and sit.
It seems commencement speeches are well-known for being long and not very helpful. Hard on the seat and boring on the mind. If you want to read one that is more enjoyable, go here. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer gives his thoughts on his own life for the graduates of Stanford University this year. His personal story is encouraging and shows how the most unlikely experiences can be the ones that make a big difference. For instance:
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.
