Stay hungry, stay foolish
I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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'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 relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
Holy Innocents gives us an opportunity to show how soon Christ was peetscuerd. With the calender presenting opportunities to preach on Simeon, Anna, the Flight to Egypt and all those texts convey about Christ as fulfillment of Law, Prophecy and His Humiliation; Holy Innocents allows us to present the Cross born by even the unsuspecting and seemingly undeserving.Pastors need to know where their members are with regard to unforeseen and unsuspected, unreasonable tragedy. Holy Innocents provides just such an opportunity. The mourning cry of Rachel weeping for her children, the senseless loss of life, can be grasped by cancer victims and victims of other tragedies not reasonable by sins committed.I'm preaching on Holy Innocents because of the situation of several of my parishoners. The Historic Lectionary is an invaluable guide, but the pastor's duty as seelsorger for his flock should guide the choice of text.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent 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, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
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Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 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—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 well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty.
I chose Latin and English but just Latin is okay and I normally have my hand miassl. If it was just English there would have to be a really good reason, I might think that was okay if it was during the lunch hour. At our EF Sunday Mass in my city, it is almost always Latin and then English like most places. But one day when the pastor (who does not celebrate the EF) was going to come and in lieu of a regular homily speak about filling out a parish questionnaire form, the young priest who was celebrating omitted reading the readings in English and the pastor (who had intended to tie in the Gospel, about the talents) was upset with him about it in front of everyone and clearly seemed to see English readings as non negotiable. But I doubt there was one person in the pews who was upset, not only did many have hand miassls, they also give out sheets with the propers and readings. There is one elderly priest who celebrates the EF who finds the same reading in the Novus Ordo lectionary and reads it from there at the ambo, the other priests use one or another hand miassl (and my older hand miassl usually has the words slightly different). So, there is not even a required official text to use for the English translation, it is just a nice bonus to help us out.I think one of the things about Latin is not only is it universal, not only does us allow us to pray in the same words as so many Christians through the ages, but also since it is largely set aside for sacred use, its meanings are not as much colored by mundane, secular, vulgar associations, dated or regional language, disputes over gender neutral language etc. It is not so weighed down, so we can just worship God in peace. I have never studied Latin but I enjoy Mass in Latin in either form and it is okay when I do not know what everything means. [Your comment reminds me of the irony that over the last 40 years people were suppossed to "participate" more. If that was successful, pretty much everyone would know and love and let themselves be drawn into the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Yet, I think you could count on one hand in any diocese those who know they are being offered through, with and in Christ's Sacrifice to the Father by the firey love of the Holy Spirit, even among daily Mass goers. This was in part the fault of the ridiculous mockery by the earlier ICEL of the texts, part the fault of the priests and bishops of the day (how well I remember!), who spoke of anything but the Holy Sacrifice. We must get hold of our Catholic identity again. What's that? Being drawn into the Sacrifice by Christ Himself.]
We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well.
But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out.
What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months.
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I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.
I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me.
Only that in some dioceses, some patorss tend to leave messes for their brother priests to clean up. Not just liturgy, but finances, unmet promises, engaged couples, and the like.You do realize that your in comment #24 is plural, and refers to you diocesan priests. It's only natural that outgoing patorss will pass the buck on matters that don't interest them or that bother them. Or that they just don't want to deal with. It happens every time there's a change in command. Usually it's minor stuff. On the other hand, firing a long-time music director before even hearing the first confession in a new parish (or the entrance song at the Saturday night Mass): that's just plain cold. And probably immoral.
I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.
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It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it.
I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.