Quotes and Comments
I've been reading this book recently for a Graduate class called "The World is Flat". It talks about how technology has connected every part of the world to each other. ANyways, I'd like to first note some really great quotes and then talk about them in turn... maybe...
"Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford University (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...
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 ery 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 might 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 patents; 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 cents 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 ever 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 typefaces, and 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... Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, harma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
I just love this quote! It's so strong to me right now personally. It's something that I firmly believe, and especially right now, in this transition semester for me, it's something important for me to cling to. I mean, I'm just working and teaching and studying and frankly it just really sucks and it would be really easy to get frustrated and hopeless about lots of things, but this quote really bangs home the things I've been thinking quite recently. Unfortunately, the waiting thing is the hardest for me. I want to see results now. But patience is something that I feel like I need to learn some more, even though I'm a shade under 24 and still haven't a clue what's next
Chinese pity comes from their belief that we are a country in decline. More than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb fu bu guo san dai (wealth doesn't make it past three generations) as they wonder how we became so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute. The fury surrounding Monica-gate seemed an incomprehensible waste of time to a nation whose emperors were supplied with thousands of concubines. Chinese are equally astonished that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt and under-fund public schools while the media focus on fights over feeding tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we can without getting fat.
-James McGregor, a journalist-turned0businessman based in China, and a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, writing in the Washing Post, July 31, 2005
Ugh... I just really don't like this quote... Why? Well.. because it's just sad. I didn't say it was true, I didn't say I agree with it or disagree. I just don't like it. I think that we need to do a better job of finding what are the most important things in our society... but it seems clear to me that we already have. And it becomes more evident what these things are from an outsiders point of view. The strange thing is that unfortunately, we aren't outsiders here in America. These are actually us! And the problem that we have in America is that we don't care at all about these things. We know and see the same things that the outsiders see, but it really doesn't hit us that these things are really as prevalent as they really are. How could we let our society come to this? How could we let our civilization become known for this? Do we even care? It's disgusting how we can let other people talk about us like this and not care at all. Thus, once again I'll say... U just really don't like this quote.
"Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford University (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...
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 ery 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 might 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 patents; 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 cents 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 ever 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 typefaces, and 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... Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, harma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
I just love this quote! It's so strong to me right now personally. It's something that I firmly believe, and especially right now, in this transition semester for me, it's something important for me to cling to. I mean, I'm just working and teaching and studying and frankly it just really sucks and it would be really easy to get frustrated and hopeless about lots of things, but this quote really bangs home the things I've been thinking quite recently. Unfortunately, the waiting thing is the hardest for me. I want to see results now. But patience is something that I feel like I need to learn some more, even though I'm a shade under 24 and still haven't a clue what's next
Chinese pity comes from their belief that we are a country in decline. More than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb fu bu guo san dai (wealth doesn't make it past three generations) as they wonder how we became so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute. The fury surrounding Monica-gate seemed an incomprehensible waste of time to a nation whose emperors were supplied with thousands of concubines. Chinese are equally astonished that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt and under-fund public schools while the media focus on fights over feeding tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we can without getting fat.
-James McGregor, a journalist-turned0businessman based in China, and a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, writing in the Washing Post, July 31, 2005
Ugh... I just really don't like this quote... Why? Well.. because it's just sad. I didn't say it was true, I didn't say I agree with it or disagree. I just don't like it. I think that we need to do a better job of finding what are the most important things in our society... but it seems clear to me that we already have. And it becomes more evident what these things are from an outsiders point of view. The strange thing is that unfortunately, we aren't outsiders here in America. These are actually us! And the problem that we have in America is that we don't care at all about these things. We know and see the same things that the outsiders see, but it really doesn't hit us that these things are really as prevalent as they really are. How could we let our society come to this? How could we let our civilization become known for this? Do we even care? It's disgusting how we can let other people talk about us like this and not care at all. Thus, once again I'll say... U just really don't like this quote.
posted by Zach Barnes at 5:28 PM
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