Jordan Ramesh, September 3rd, 2020
In much the same vein as his career trajectory and the man himself, Steve Jobs began the 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech in intriguing fashion–“Truth be told, I never graduated from college… and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.” These words preface several stories that Jobs shares as he stands before Stanford’s graduating class of 2005.
His first anecdote, which Jobs describes as a “story about connecting the dots,” involves Jobs’ decision to drop out of Reed College after the first six months. For Jobs, this story truly began at birth, amidst his adoption and the promise that he would undoubtedly attend college in the future. He talks about how he lost sight of the value in going to college at the expense of his working-class parents. He talks about the educational freedom that dropping out afforded him, as he could liberate himself of “required” courses and instead drop in on those that actually interested him. Throughout this recollection, what really stood out to me was Jobs’ anecdote about dropping in on a calligraphy class that would later become the foundation of the typography designed for the first Macintosh computer.
Interjected by a brief opportunity to throw shade at Windows, Jobs describes how the impact (or absence, had he never decided to drop out) of a single course could have demonstratively altered the very face of the Mac that we know so well today. Jobs’ subsequent concession of foresight being the key to connecting dots such as calligraphy class and the first Macintosh served to further solidify a thought in my mind as I listened to his speech: Nothing is truly predetermined. You are only ever the accumulation of your thoughts, your knowledge, and your experiences. Make of those what you will.
This belief of mine has grown steadily throughout my years at The College of New Jersey, from my freshman year as a Biology major to my time spent in Interactive Multimedia today. With regard to IMM specifically, this major has afforded me the opportunity to learn a plethora of interdisciplinary skills–all of which I value and only some of which I haven’t the slightest idea how to implement. Be it music production, photo-imaging, or the differences between the human and bird respiratory systems (bird lungs are about half the size and have nine air sacs), I’ve studied these concepts with a purpose–even if I don’t particularly know what that entails quite yet.
“Believing the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-word path.” This theme permeates throughout Jobs’ following story, as well. This story encompassed Jobs’ failures throughout his life, including but not limited to his very public exit from Apple in 1985 and the consequent loss of what had to this point been his life’s work, in its entirety. These failures, as is their nature, would bring about humiliation, self-doubt, and irreversible change. To any designer, failures, missteps, and changes such as these can seem like insurmountable walls that rise from within a path that you most likely felt had been cemented. The takeaway here, at least to me, is that for Jobs and for any designer worth their premium LinkedIn subscription, there was never going to be a single path towards the future. Each and every calligraphy class opens up a new, unexplored path to be traversed and interwoven among all the others you may have forgotten along the way. My plans for my senior thesis are going to explore these crossroads thoroughly, and if an idea proves too difficult, too time-consuming, or too ill-conceived, then I can only hope to have brought a large enough sledgehammer to tear down those insurmountable walls with authority.