Quote of the Day by Steve Jobs: Apple founder’s most famous words; Stay Hungry, Stay …
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is considered to be one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the tech world. He is known for his passion, high standards for himself and everyone around him, which always reflected in the products launched by the company. In one of his most famous quotes, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”, delivered at Stanford University in 2005, he reflected upon his decision to drop out of Reed College after just six months. He also explained why he thought it was one of the best things he ever did while also giving an important advice for the students.Jobs’ core message was a call to action: to maintain the curiosity, stay hungry and hungry even if your decision appears foolish to others.Jobs said that his “biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student” who “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.’”
Jobs left college because he did not ‘see value’ in it
As per per Jobs, he was ‘naive’ to choose “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.”According to the Apple founder, initially it seemed a very “scary” decision “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.”
Jobs slept on floor of his friends’ rooms and ate at Hare Krishna temple
“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 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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.”Jobs explained that dropping out of college gave him the freedom and practical knowledge that he thinks he would not have received during his time at college. He learnt about calligraphy and “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.”“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.”
End of the speech, his advice to the students was…
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.He talked about how how an amazing publication called “The Whole Earth Catalog”, which was one of the bibles of his generation, was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand and brought a poetic touch.”“Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
