Steve Jobs had three primary stories that he told in his speech, but what I thought connected the most with myself and my own journey was when he talked about taking a Calligraphy class just because he wanted to, which linked to his idea of connecting the dots in the past. For myself, I do have some sort of vague goal for what I want to do post-college, but I’ve mostly just been taking classes that I enjoy, and spending my time doing things that I enjoy, even if they don’t work towards my end goal. To be honest, sometimes I think this isn’t the best decision. Should I be more focused on one thing so that I can move faster towards that goal? That seems to be the general consensus lately, but maybe that’s wrong. Maybe I am doing a good thing by spreading out and learning about many different interests of mine, just because I can and I enjoy it.
An example of how this applies directly to my thesis is that my plan is to make an album, which is just something that I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a little kid. While I would like to work in the music industry, my ultimate goal is more based on video creation, and I don’t plan to ever be a professional musician. In theory, this thesis project might not help me that much in my professional development. However, learning about audio will definitely help with making videos, and I have already used some audio knowledge from Electronic Music to improve the audio quality in my videos. Making an album and working on my own music could also help if I end up doing production work for musicians. Being comfortable releasing music could help expand my character and give me more charisma in my YouTube videos. Or perhaps all I will get from this project is just the finished product, and that’s ok too. I feel like at this point I’ve taken on enough side projects that a lot of things seem to blend together, and I probably subconsciously share more information between projects than I currently realize.
Steve Jobs’ anecdote about being fired from Apple, and then going on to make Next and Pixar can also be applied to my life assessment. He didn’t talk about it, but let’s be real – the fact that Steve created Apple probably helped him a lot with getting these other projects off the ground, since he already had a big foot in the tech industry and was probably well known as the person who made Apple. Being in any tech or creative industry, the chances of me working on one project for the rest of my life is likely pretty slim. Right now I have a YouTube channel that I’m trying to lift off the ground, and even if that becomes wildly popular at some point in time, some other platform will probably take over eventually, or some other people might disrupt my channel. I probably wouldn’t end up doing YouTube forever, but I would like to get to the point where I am well known for something, so that I already have a following who would be willing to support whatever creative projects I pivot to next. I feel like my goal more than anything else is to build myself and my own brand, because that will likely keep an audience longer than if I were to just create one single product. That way, if I get fired or overshadowed by someone else, I can move on to make my next big thing. Moving from project to project is something that makes me pretty anxious, but is seemingly a way of life for the industries I’m interested in being a part of.
Amanda