#TEXAS TOOTHPICKS HOW TO#

#TEXAS TOOTHPICKS HOW TO#

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. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. I returned Coke bottles for the five-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 didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. 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 far more interesting. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. She refused to sign the final adoption papers.

Do you want him?' They said, 'Of course.' My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, 'We've got an unexpected baby boy. 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. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.

So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. The first story is about connecting the dots.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Transcript of Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech:

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