[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophy in China
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:04:25 -0700
"Everybody wants a good job after university life,
but God knows what a guy with a brain of strange
thoughts can do after graduation," said Yuan Chunfen,
mother of a local high school boy.
Excerpt from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address:
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.
-----------------------
So, you never know.
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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