I recently watched the 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address by Steve Jobs. Perhaps you have already seen it - the website reports 1.4 million hits! - but it was new to me, and it contained some excellent points about the good life that I would like to mention here.
I know little about Steve Jobs, so I will focus on the message and not the messenger. That said, this particular message was also about the messenger. Specifically, his 15-minute talk consisted of three personal stories, and it is one of the best speeches I have ever heard, especially of the commencement address genre. Despite being well-intended, such talks are usually platitudinous, tedious, and endless. Elderly relatives of college graduates often keel over during them. Heat stroke? Maybe. But boredom might play a role as well, and older audience members could simply be taking an easy way out. After all, life is short.
To judge from the audience shots that interspersed the speech, no one listening to Jobs keeled over. No one looked bored. Indeed, the entire audience was fully engaged. My day job is that of a lecturer, and I would be thrilled if half of the people listening to me in Ann Arbor were half as interested half the time as were all of those listening to Jobs during his entire address in Palo Alto.
Speaking of speaking, stories are always a good vehicle in a talk, especially when packaged in threes. Folks who study such things talk about the "law of three" as a powerful rhetorical strategy. Use three adjectives. Employ three examples. Make three points. And when you tell a joke about guys walking into a bar, be sure it's three of them - not two and certainly not four.
The first story he told was about dropping out of Reed College. More exactly, he stopped paying tuition for classes he didn't like but stayed on campus, dropping in on classes he did like. One of these was a calligraphy class. The relevance of this chance event is in front of me as I write this blog entry and in front of you as you read it: different fonts for computer text and proportional spacing, innovations introduced by Jobs years later that made the first Macintosh computer the apple of so many people's eye. The point? Jobs told his audience to connect the dots in life, appreciating that you cannot do so looking forward. You can only do so when looking back. And you need faith - optimism? - that someday the dots will connect.
The second story he told was about getting fired from Apple Computers, the company that he had co-founded. Talk about coupling insult with injury! But hurt and dismayed though he was, Jobs realized that he still loved what he was doing, so he kept doing it. He founded Pixar. He founded NeXT, which was then acquired by Apple, and you know the rest of the story. The point? Find something that you love to do, because "The only way to do great work is to love what you do."
The third story was about his experience with pancreatic cancer, which made his own mortality more than an abstraction. According to Jobs, "Death is very likely the single best invention of life" because it allows you to sidestep the trap of thinking you have something to lose. The point? Jobs reported that he often asks himself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" When the answer is no for too many days in a row, he knows he needs to change something.
Steve Jobs ended his speech with the admonition: "Stay hungry - stay foolish." Borrowed from the final Whole Earth Catalogue, this advice sounds good, and Jobs repeated it several times. But I don't buy it, or at least not all of it, maybe because it violates the law of three. Stay hungry? Sure. Stay foolish? No way. None of the lessons he conveyed about living a good life is remotely foolish.
