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My biological mother was a young, *** college graduate student, and she decided to put me
up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted
by college graduates, but 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 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
parentsí savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldnít see the value in it.
So I decided to drop out and the minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required
classes that didnít interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
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.
Because I had dropped out and didnít have to take the normal classes, I decided to take
a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science canít 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.
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.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was
one of the bibles of my generation.
This was in the late 1960ís, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid
cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form,
35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools
and great notions.
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.
And I have always wished that for myself.
And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.