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 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, its 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.