只有走過才能回頭看清足跡
雖說Steve Jobs逝世多年，但當年在史丹佛大學的演講至今仍是經典，談論的都是他的人生故事，沒有太多哲學的大道理。
第一則是談論他走過一段荒蕪的大學歷程，雖最終輟學，但這段期間也是奠定他往後有機會在研發麥金塔電腦時創造出美妙字體的最佳黃金期。
期間，他只上了半年大學學程，然後中輟期間投入字體課程一年半，而且還是旁聽生，但這堂課完全吸引了他的目光、他的直覺告訴他想留在課堂上。
當時這門課對他的職涯發展短期內起不了效益，但他還是選擇堅持繼續上課，在旁人眼中，現實的生活條件根本不足以讓他負擔繼續上課的時間成本與生活費。
這門課的效益，十年後才開始發酵，並且一發不可收拾，直接催生了Mac個人電腦的創造。
基於他的生長背景環境，這段人生歷程如果沒有後來的賈伯斯，可能充其量不過就是段黑歷史-退學，但他把握住了堅持下來的核心，即便看不清眼前的路，他還是選擇走下去。
即便現在的學習無法立即派上用場，你還是可以選擇繼續自我充實！
1/22 管理課-成就卓越管理力
https://www.facebook.com/events/333333730819014/?ti=icl
-原文-
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 very 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 night 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 parents’ 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¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 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 every 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 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 10 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 backward 10 years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.
