Steve Jobs In Praise of Dropping Out 1014
atlacatl writes "Wired reports on Steve Jobs giving a graduation speech: 'Jobs, 50, said he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out after only eight months because it was too expensive for his working-class family. He said his real education started when he "dropped in" on whatever classes interested him -- including calligraphy.' The irony: that most students were graduating. I wouldn't invite him for a high school graduation. Imagine all the 'hard' work teachers, parents and guidance counselors put into brainwashing every kid that he/she must go to University." (Jobs was speaking to the graduates at Stanford University.)
Re:Bah (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't follow Steve Jobs advice. (Score:5, Informative)
And when Wozniak set up his own company in 1986, Jobs threatened Wozniak's suppliers against doing business with Wozniak.
Just because Jobs did something in his past doesn't mean that is a good path to follow.
Re:Sure, a few people drop out because they are sm (Score:5, Informative)
Nice, but it's an urban legend [snopes.com].
OP Misinterprets the Speech (Score:5, Informative)
This is not an anti-education message. In fact, it is a message strongly in favor of a liberal-arts education. In Steve's original college career, he was going through the motions -- going to college because that was the thing to do. When he started learning again, he was doing it out of a personal desire to learn, and with more genuine motivations. And he was taking classes to improve himself and his outlook, not just to get nuts-and-bolts information that would advance his career. Steve's saying that you have to invest yourself in learning and appreciate its value where you might not expect it.
Those of you who are oversimplifying this into a "street smarts" vs. "book smarts" thing have watched too much of The Apprentice. This was a speech about the personal value of learning and the importance of an open mind and broad perspective.
Re:Avoid ask.slashdot for a few days... (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, think that many people are just resentful of the fact that intelligent people do not need to go to school to get ahead.
Re:I wouldn't follow Steve Jobs advice. (Score:5, Informative)
Many years later, Woz (then rich and famous) was flying on a plane when he picked up a magazine and read the story for the first time; he reportedly wept when he read it.
proportional fonts: not-so-subtle revisionism? (Score:5, Informative)
If the late Jef Raskin had anything to do with it, they would; he recalls lobbying for versatile bitmapped displays and not hard-wired fixed width character generators, against Jobs and Wozniak.
Sadly Jef is no longer with us to defend the account, but he left a detailed history, The Mac and Me [chac.org]:
Later in the essay, Raskin notes that Jobs was eventually persuaded to green-light the Apple II's "high res" mode. Only Steve himself knows if an enthusiasm for calligraphy influenced the decision... but even had he not, proportional fonts were already being designed into the expensive research workstations of the day, where the hardware budget was orders of magnitude greater than an Apple II's.In other words (Score:5, Informative)
Actually Jobs said more than dropping out (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA (Score:2, Informative)
As someone who was actually there to hear it - he didn't say everyone should drop out of college. Far from it - instead, he said it was exactly what HE needed at the time. He didn't do it because he was being an irresponsible dick, he did it because his tuition costs were overwhelming his parents' resources and he didn't want to do that to them.
He wasn't attempting to invalidate the degrees of the people he was speaking to - instead he was using a very personal story to explain the idea that people should go through life with confidence rather than be afraid of what can happen...
I've seen four or five commencement speeches over the last few years and in all honesty, this one was the best by far. It was heartfelt, had important things to say and alternated between being funny and quite touching. Jobs obviously put a lot of thought into the speech and really took it seriously.
Re:Just because Jobs dropped out... (Score:3, Informative)
The Woz went back to Berkeley and got his degree in 1982, while he took a break at Apple. Read more about Wozniak here [wikipedia.org].
Re:I wouldn't follow Steve Jobs advice. (Score:2, Informative)
Er... no. From the very page that you linked to [woz.org], he says that it happened (and he didn't like it):
I was hurt in later years when I heard that Steve was paid more than he'd told me, and I don't think that I hurt easily.
Transcript of Jobs' commencement speech (Score:5, Informative)
Today I want to 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 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.
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.
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 th
Re:Why then does Apple *require* degrees for IT jo (Score:1, Informative)
1. start your own company
2. develop an absolutely amazing product
3. get bought out by Apple
Shouldn't be a problem for you, I guess.
Obviously you might find you are too great and successful and prefer step 3b: buy Apple
Re:Steve Jobs' experience was unique.. (Score:3, Informative)