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June 15, 2005
Drop out
Wired says Steve Jobs told Stanford grads dropping out was the best thing he could've done.
"Your time is limited so don't let it be wasted living someone else's life," Jobs said to a packed stadium of graduates, alumni and family.
I'm sure Steve says that to all the people who work for him. "Don't waste your life doing what I tell you to do."
Cross this with What You Can't Say from Paul Graham, which Geoff Arnold blogged about Monday.
Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them.
Paul, that's mythology. Most nerds have accepted the blinders, probably more than people emptying garbage cans. Sure, they get to show up for work at 11:30 am wearing clothes almost studied to say, "Look at this. I'm so outside the box." Most nerds probably also accept a lot of crapola outside their domain of expertise. We're happy when a product we worked on sells, even if it's directly to the military. We watch the news, filters off, sitting there gobbing every drop of that raging torrent of sewage. We buy iPods.
Geoff Arnold quoted Paul Graham, "Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?"
I guess that's a test to see whether you've had a lobotomy. My wife once had me take homeopathic medecine that was supposed to help me let it out. That medecine seemed mainly to make it easier for me to be grouchy. Paul writes:
The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.
It's true, Noam never got any real work done in linguistics before he flaked off into doing the lecture circuit as a scholarly anarchist. We'd better stay clued in, graduating through the hoops, even if Paul says we shouldn't. Ain't that right, Steve?
Posted by Mark at June 15, 2005 09:03 AM
Comments
Hi Mark, Cyril Fievet, blogueur français parle lui aussi du discours de Steve Jobs à Stanford :
http://www.nanoblog.com/past/2005/06/steve_jobs_soye.htm
Posted by: tilly at June 15, 2005 10:07 PM
I think dropping out of college worked for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates because they had something else to do. So it would work for lots of other people if they had a good thing started and needed to work on it.
Posted by: Teena at June 16, 2005 02:16 PM