Steve Jobs, my friend the college dropout, gave the 2005 commencement address at Stanford. I’m all for higher education — I have post graduate degrees and I’m deeply invested in the Claremont Colleges — but I still love it when things like this happen. It’s a reality check for people who believe absolutely have to color inside the lines.
I thought Steve delivered a remarkable speech, full of hopeful realism. Without putting words in his mouth or implying that we share an identical worldview, over the next few days I want to comment on what Steve told the Stanford graduates. I hope he won’t mind.
Why did Steve Jobs drop out of college? “It started before I was born,” he said, explaining the circumstances of his adoption by working-class parents. 17 years later he spent six months at Reed College but 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.
He called the move: “pretty scary at the time,” but said, “looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.” Why? Because after he dropped out of school Steve took a calligraphy class:
I learned about serif and san 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 this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. 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, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Connect the Dots is a game that can only be played backward. This is what the writer of the biblical Book of Hebrews articulated so well. Hebrews chapter 11 is a roll call of faithful people: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses’ parents, Moses and the people he led out of Egypt, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets. It’s a good read. Verse 39 concludes:
These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
— Hebrews 11:39-12:3, New International Version
Everybody on the list, including Jesus, took God’s good intentions by faith, hoping for the resurrection of their dreams and, in fact, for the resurrection of their bodies. This is not the sort of outcome that can be known in advance – only hoped-for, only trusted-in.
Which goes against the grain for many of us. It sounds soft, unscientific, a little spacey. Were Steve Jobs not the CEO of Pixar and the architect of Apple’s renaissance, he couldn’t get away with what he told the Stanford grads (some people were less than happy to hear it as it was).
Were Jesus not the author and perfecter of our faith – had it turned out he was wrong about the resurrection – there would be no story to tell beyond vague hopes and good intentions.
Which brings us to the question of biblical faith, where we are in the same conundrum as those who came before us: Playing Connect the Dots backwards, making sense of our choices after having committed ourselves lock, stock and barrel to the hope that the return will be greater than the risk.
