Looking back on life, how would you rate the decisions that you've made? Do you love what you do? Have you followed your curiosity and intuition or have you settled for something less? How would reflecting on these questions help you make better decisions in the future? If you've answered unfavorably to any of these, then I would suggest you spend 15 minutes viewing Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford University from 2005.
Immediately, Jobs displays both humility and humor by disclosing that he is not a college graduate, and this was actually the closest he had ever been to a college graduation ceremony. The crowd was receptive to the joke as well as seeming to be intrigued by the fact that Steve Jobs is indeed, a college dropout.
Soon after he notified the attendees that he planned to share three stories with them, "That's it, no big deal, just three stories," he stated. To me, this allowed the audience to develop a general idea of the time frame for the intended duration of the remainder of Jobs' speech.
Story number one's theme was "connecting the dots." Jobs described the story of his adoption, providing background information about the deal between his biological mother and adoptive parents. Jobs' biological mother only wanted to give her son to parents who were college graduates. Although Jobs' adoptive parents disclosed that they had not been, they ensured her by promising to send him to college. A deal was reached. From infancy, Jobs was already prearranged to enroll in college.
Later in life, as a student at Reed College, Jobs couldn't see the value in it. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life and had no idea how college was going to help him figure it out. All the while, his tuition had been eating up the money that his parents had been saving for him his entire life. He began dropping out of assigned classes and "dropping in" on courses that he had an interest in, one being Calligraphy. He was fascinated by it but wasn't positive if there would be any real-world application of this information later in life. Ten years had passed until he implemented what he had learned (of Calligraphy) into the first Mac. He included that Mac, "would've never had multiple typefaces and proportionately spaced fonts" if it weren't for dropping in on that class.
The main point of his story is how he chose to conclude it. Jobs' said, "It was difficult to connect the dots at the time in college, but it was very easy when I looked back ten years later. You cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. You have to trust that they will. You have to trust in something because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the path. That will make all the difference."
I deliberately left out reviews of the second and third stories to encourage my readers to watch the video on their own. I found this commencement speech to be inspiring. It was a wise move to captivate the crowd as early as possible by disclosing the information about being a college dropout. It turned out quite all right for Jobs, as anyone who's ever heard of him knows that he ended up doing just fine in the professional world.
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