Keputusan luar biasa dari Stanford bahwa commencement
speech tahun ini disampaikan oleh seorang yang tidak
pernah tamat college. Dilahirkan diluar nikah, dia
dipungut oleh orang yang kurang mampu, tapi berjanji
untuk menyekolahkan dia ke college tapi lalu si Steve
Job dropped out karena merasa tuition terlalu
memberatkan orang tua angkatnya. Nah, bagaimana
kesialan itu membawa hikmah, itu dia ceritakan dalam
pidato itu. Dalam umur yang sangat muda dia jadi
co-founder dari Apple. Aneh, tapi nyata pada umur 30
tahun, dia dipecat dari perusahaan yang dia dirikan --
tapi itu juga ada hikmahnya bagi Steve Job. Kalau dia
masih di Apple, kemungkinan besar dia tidak menekuni
animasi -- dan dia mendirikan Pixar. Apple akhirnya
menggaet Pixar dan perusahaan yang memecatnya ini
mengangkat dia jadi CEO. Mungkin karena Steve Job ini
sudah berkenalan dengan falsafat timur, dia berujar
janganlah engkau mengikuti dogma apapun karena dengan
demikian engkau akan mengkuti pikiran orang lain --
ikutilah bisikan murni dari nuranimu.
Salam,
RM
Steve Jobs' Convocation Speech (Stanford)
Monday, June 20, 2005 17:53
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve
Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation
Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement
from one of the finest universities in the world. I
never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is
the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
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 6
months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for
another 18 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 college 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do you want
him? They said: Of course. My biological mother
later found out 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 someday go to
college.
And 17 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 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 how
college was going to help me figure it out. And here I
was spending all of 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 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 5? deposits to buy food with, and
I would walk the 7 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 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
