Here we see Steve Jobs delivering his commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005. In it he talks about getting fired from Apple in 1985, life & death.
You’ll have setbacks in life. God has a plan. Don’t ever give up.
I WILL LIFT MY HANDS TO YOU
When I was a middle school teacher, students would sometimes come to me and ask, “Why do I have to learn this stuff?” It didn’t seem to matter much whether the subject was math, science, or Bible. The standard response runs something like, “This stuff will be useful to you later in life. You don’t really understand now, but you will.”
While there’s some validity to that answer, I wonder if we answer that way partly because we ourselves don’t know the answers. Most teachers don’t have a worldview that is as unified and full of interconnections as we think we do.
To see what I’m getting at, try writing down a list of what topics students study in school. Then choose two at random and combine them to make a subject. Here are some examples:
History of technology
Mathematics of music
Philosophy of computer programming
Biblical psychology
Economics of geology
Biology of music
Theology of philosophy
Languages in home economics
Science of physical fitness
Apologetics in economics
Language of counseling
Business of art
How many science teachers teach the history of technology or the economics of geology? Phrases like this sound strange to us, but they’re actually very practical fields.
It would be an interesting experiment to ask Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computers, whether he would have introduced as many innovative ideas if he hadn’t been aware of the effect of other such innovations in the history of technology, such as Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line.
Maybe we should also ask petroleum companies who are working on the oil sands of Alberta whether economics, geology, and current events are connected.
Should we blame teachers for our lack of a comprehensive worldview? This is tempting, but think about what we’re asking of our educational system. If teachers knew enough about the history of technology to start their own companies and become rich, how many would have the motivation or free time to be teachers?
Look at what happened to me. For the past year and a half, I’ve been determined to have enough income to support a family and be involved in ministry, and that’s taken me temporarily away from the classroom. If I had five kids, I might never return. And who could blame me for putting my family, calling, and business first?
Even if we could blame our teachers, I don’t think it would be very productive to do so. If a student had a worldview comprehensive enough to recognize what was wrong with the school system, in what way would it benefit him to get teachers to teach him what he could learn for himself?
We have a tendency to place blame where we don’t want to take responsibility. Are you, as a student, willing to learn what your teachers don’t know and eventually work as a teacher yourself? More to the point, are you willing to fill the education gap that exists in your own life rather than just complaining about it?
I’m going to take a radical step and say that it’s your responsibility to learn what teachers aren’t able to show you. The fact that you’re reading this means you’re probably enough of an adult to do this own your own.
If your worldview is broader and deeper than what schools are teaching you, then you may also realize that your life doesn’t have to follow the path that others have laid out for you. Maybe you don’t need to get a job and work 9-to-5. Maybe the world isn’t even headed in that direction any more.
Think of what technology has done to snail mail and long-distance phone bills. Who’s to say that it won’t eventually make equally radical changes to our work environments? When Californians call a big company’s customer service line, they get a voice from India or Oklahoma. It’s more economical to outsource customer support to places where the cost of living is low.
Now combine what you’ve learned about economics, science, math, and current events. What will these companies do to eliminate gasoline costs and commute time as the price of oil rises? Perhaps someday, customer service employees will work from their living rooms or bedsides. They could be paid per call or per telephone minute.
We teachers generally live in the past. We make the same amount of money regardless of what we teach or how successful our high school graduates are. There’s no incentive for us to try to forecast the future like a businessperson would. But if America’s past history of technology and economic growth are any indication, we should be prepared for things to change, not stay the same.
Just to be clear, I’m not encouraging you to rebel against your teachers or parents. I’m not suggesting that you stop going to school. Not only would that be disrespectful (Hebrews 13:7, 17), you won’t be able to help anyone if you’re sitting in the school office half the week.
I’m suggesting that you give yourself the education that schools can’t help you with. A good place to start would be to sign up for Gary North’s e-mail list and read some of Paul Graham’s essays.
I’m confident that if you do this, you can learn what you need to free yourself from dependence on a 9-to-5 job. But you may choose to keep that job because you love working so much, perhaps becoming the school teacher that you never had.
Here are some excerpts from Paul Graham’s latest essay on beginning your own technology startup. His principles also apply to starting your own business in other areas.
You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It’s probably the single best predictor of success.
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How can you tell if you’re determined enough…? I’m guessing here, but I’d say the test is whether you’re sufficiently driven to work on your own projects. Though they may have been unsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn’t seem as if Larry and Sergey [the founders of Google] were meek little research assistants, obediently doing their advisors’ bidding. They started projects of their own.
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How do you tell if you’re independent-minded enough to start a startup? If you’d bristle at the suggestion that you aren’t, then you probably are.
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One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.
If you’ve had summer jobs in college, you may think you know what jobs are like, but you probably don’t. Summer jobs at technology companies are not real jobs. If you get a summer job as a waiter, that’s a real job. Then you have to carry your weight. But software companies don’t hire students for the summer as a source of cheap labor. They do it in the hope of recruiting them when they graduate. So while they’re happy if you produce, they don’t expect you to.
That will change if you get a real job after you graduate. Then you’ll have to earn your keep. And since most of what big companies do is boring, you’re going to have to work on boring stuff. Easy, compared to college, but boring. At first it may seem cool to get paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college. But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizing to work on dumb stuff, even if it’s easy and you get paid a lot.
And that’s not the worst of it. The thing that really sucks about having a regular job is the expectation that you’re supposed to be there at certain times. Even Google is afflicted with this, apparently. And what this means, as everyone who’s had a regular job can tell you, is that there are going to be times when you have absolutely no desire to work on anything, and you’re going to have to go to work anyway and sit in front of your screen and pretend to. To someone who likes work, as most good hackers do, this is torture.
In a startup, you skip all that. There’s no concept of office hours in most startups. Work and life just get mixed together. But the good thing about that is that no one minds if you have a life at work. In a startup you can do whatever you want most of the time. If you’re a founder, what you want to do most of the time is work. But you never have to pretend to.
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A significant number of would-be startup founders are probably dissuaded from doing it by their parents. I’m not going to say you shouldn’t listen to them. Families are entitled to their own traditions, and who am I to argue with them? But I will give you a couple reasons why a safe career might not be what your parents really want for you.
One is that parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would be for themselves. This is actually a rational response to their situation. Parents end up sharing more of their kids’ ill fortune than good fortune. Most parents don’t mind this; it’s part of the job; but it does tend to make them excessively conservative. And erring on the side of conservatism is still erring. In almost everything, reward is proportionate to risk. So by protecting their kids from risk, parents are, without realizing it, also protecting them from rewards. If they saw that, they’d want you to take more risks.
The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like generals, they’re always fighting the last war. If they want you to be a doctor, odds are it’s not just because they want you to help the sick, but also because it’s a prestigious and lucrative career. But not so lucrative or prestigious as it was when their opinions were formed. When I was a kid in the seventies, a doctor was the thing to be. There was a sort of golden triangle involving doctors, Mercedes 450SLs, and tennis. All three vertices now seem pretty dated.
The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead? So I think the way to deal with your parents’ opinions about what you should do is to treat them like feature requests. Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to do that is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead think about why they’re asking for something, and see if there’s a better way to give them what they need.
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This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it’s the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice.
To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It’s a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that’s something that’s changing pretty rapidly.
We may be seeing another such change right now. I’ve read a lot of economic history, and I understand the startup world pretty well, and it now seems to me fairly likely that we’re seeing the beginning of a change like the one from farming to manufacturing.
And you know what? If you’d been around when that change began (around 1000 in Europe) it would have seemed to nearly everyone that running off to the city to make your fortune was a crazy thing to do. Though serfs were in principle forbidden to leave their manors, it can’t have been that hard to run away to a city. There were no guards patrolling the perimeter of the village. What prevented most serfs from leaving was that it seemed insanely risky. Leave one’s plot of land? Leave the people you’d spent your whole life with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand complete strangers? How would you live? How would you get food, if you didn’t grow it?
Frightening as it seemed to them, it’s now the default with us to live by our wits. So if it seems risky to you to start a startup, think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do now. Oddly enough, the people who know this best are the very ones trying to get you to stick to the old model. How can Larry and Sergey say you should come work as their employee, when they didn’t get jobs themselves?
Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it. How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day people look back on what we consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say “take a seat,” and you’d sit! Imagine having to ask permission to release software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you’d have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?
It’s exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like the one from farming to manufacturing. That’s why I care about startups. Startups aren’t interesting just because they’re a way to make a lot of money. I couldn’t care less about other ways to do that, like speculating in securities. At most those are interesting the way puzzles are. There’s more going on with startups. They may represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way wealth is created.
That’s ultimately what drives us to work on Y Combinator [helping people start startups]. We want to make money, if only so we don’t have to stop doing it, but that’s not the main goal. There have only been a handful of these great economic shifts in human history. It would be an amazing hack to make one happen faster.
I will lift my voice and sing. I will sing of Your glory, the glory of my King.