Testicle Tuesday Pick: Steve Jobs
If you visit this site on a regular basis, you may know we usually celebrate “Manly Monday” at the top of each week by giving a nod to something/someone manly. Yesterday was an anomaly; I posted an update to let you know why I went MIA. So, getting back on schedule, today’s pick is kind of a “Testicle Tuesday.”
I recently discovered Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement address on Ted. I knew he was co-founder of Apple and former CEO of Pixar, but I didn’t know his background. Abandoned by his biological mother, he was raised by a working class woman who didn’t finish college and a high school dropout father. To quote Barry Switzer, some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. That hardly sounds like Jobs’ story. To be sure, he has a level a privilege. At the same time, based on his words, I get the impression he didn’t have much handed to him very easily in life. In my mind, his success is therefore all the more inspiring. Watch the clip. Particularly, I’m interested in what he says about following your passions.
“You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future,” Jobs says in the video clip above. “You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart — even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And, that will make all the difference.”
Easier said than done. I often feel awkward when I talk to people with EXTREMELY linear career paths. You know the type: John Doe majored in XX, took an entry-level job in XX and is now the VP of XX at XX, Inc. They seem so put together as they march from A to B to C.
I’ve followed my intuition and made what I thought were “good decisions” with whatever limited amount of information I had. At times, I didn’t succeed at things I wished I had. In other instances, I’ve experienced successes at points I expected failure. Hardly a linear career path, I’ve taken high school students on educational excursions to Greece to learn about Homer, worked as a bartender in London, managed a film program where Roger Ebert taught, completed a stint at an American Embassy abroad and done other things simply because I thought they’d be interesting. It’s as if I go through life marching from Point A to B to π (3.14159…) to Q to 72. It’s all a learning process, and I’ve collected an expansive and eclectic skill set along the way. For example, I don’t know if I would’ve had the courage to stick in out in New York if I hadn’t survived living in London on my own. I’m not sure I would’ve felt comfortable pouring my private life into a memoir if I didn’t already have 5+ years doing it on Funky Brown Chick and elsewhere. It’s like that line in Desiderata, “[W]hether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” I instinctively know that, but sometimes it’s good to hear it again. So, thank you TED (and Steve Jobs) for the reminder.
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