Listening Exercise

(This program is brought to you by Stanford University, please visit us at stanford.edu).

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of finest universities in the world. Truth be told I've never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever got into a college graduation. Today I wanna 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 Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as for another eighteen months before I really quit. So why I dropped out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young unwed graduate student and she decided to pop me out 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 when I popped out, they decided in the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents who are on 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 ... few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life. And seventeen 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 parent saving would ... spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't see the value on 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 save their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. The minute I dropped out, I can stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ... that interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. i dorm room so i slept on the floor in friend's rooms. I return coke botols for five cents deposits to buy food with, and I would walk to seven miles across town every sunday night to get one good meal a week at The Hare Khrisna Temple. I loved it. And much I stumbled into by folowing my curiousity intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offer perhaps the best caligraphy instruction in the country. Througout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautiful hand caligraph. Because i have dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes

i decided to take caligraphy class learn how to do this

i learned about serif and san serif

about varying space between different letter combinations

about what makes typography. It was beautiful, historical, artistically in a way that science can captured 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 the beautiful typography

if i never dropped in single course in college, The Mac fonts. And since Windows just copy The Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would've never dropped in caligraphy 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 connecting your future. You have to trust in something. Your God, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing wiht the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it lead you path and that will make all the difference.

~> Setelah sekian lama di-php-in (alias jadi draft yang nggak pernah ditengok lagi), saya post aja deh tulisan ini. Hehe.