Commencement

I loved my university years.  I got to go to a classroom  and talk about (and listen to) good books and writings, and I had to participate with a grasp (nay, a love) of the subject or hold a diminished opinion in the eyes of mentors I revered.  Despite that pressure, university life fit me like a glove.  I had clear expectations and yet enough play on the rope to either create a hammock or hang myself.  I always managed to create the hammock.

Sooner or later, though, I had to graduate.  Sooner or later, my luck in life ran out.  I got back to the same setting later, for a semester, at Berkeley’s extension.  But that experience was a mild reprieve, too brief.  Be sensible, sayeth the world.  Go out and do the things to support yourself, to conform, regardless of the cost in the long run.

In my own way, I dropped out of college.

*****

Lately, I’ve had a fascination with commencement addresses.  I find them on YouTube and Facebook--not by purposefully searching for them, but by skimming through the day’s news and stumbling upon them--and I post them on my Facebook page.  (“Share.”  Such a powerful word when I was a kid, and so diminished now.  Shouldn’t we call the button “Shout-Out” instead of “Share?”  Perhaps the term “Shout-Out” is too MySpace.)  Sometimes I post them first to watch later, and sometimes I watch them first.

I’ve spent the last two weeks reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, and at one point in the narrative Isaacson urges the reader off the page to go explore YouTube, to go find and watch Jobs 2005 commencement address at Stanford.  Jobs attended college himself only briefly, and spent much of that short stay skipping his required courses and attending courses that truly inspired him.  (If you haven’t seen the video, I too encourage you to see it, just to experience how a college drop-out--someone who would normally have no business standing behind a podium addressing a field of college graduates--addresses a field of college graduates.)

Reading about Jobs for the last two weeks, I realized that there were lots of things Steve Jobs had no "authority" to do.  His temper provokes most of that impression.  I can’t judge whether it should, for I have a temper myself, a temper that like Jobs tends to fester from what Jobs called “B players.”  In the opinion of most, Steve Jobs shouldn’t have managed people.  Steve Jobs shouldn’t have had kids.  Steve Jobs shouldn't have been issued a California driver’s license.

Well, that last one is more of an observable fact than a judgment call.

Questions on management and children, however, are an easy way out of the debate as stating that a college drop-out shouldn’t speak to a group of graduates.  Is this the phrase that should preface the judgment call?

“But then, who am I to say?”

I can say that phrase when I see a college drop-out giving a commencement speech, because, while I did graduate from college, I never got to attend my commencement.  A Missouri ice storm in December prevented me.

*****

“But then, who am I to say?”

My review of the Jobs biography will most assuredly be misconstrued for hero worship.  Fascination with the subject and the writing are sure to produce that in the reader who comes here wanting to know, “Well, how was it?”

It?  The life or the book?

The book was inspiring.  That’s the only adjective you’ll get, to take a page from Jobs’s simplistic style.  At times I worried that Isaacson might pull a little hero-worship of his own, but then he would throw in an anecdote or quote of Jobs and make you realize that Jobs could be the grumpy, moody, reality-challenged guy the media claimed he was.  Just when the reader is about to give up on Jobs, then Isaacson pulls you back the other way, and you look up from the book with a gasp and realize what a genius looks like.

The writer or the life...

Well, the writer, yes...I have to say that it takes a lot of courage to write a book like the book Isaacson wrote--a lot of courage and maybe a small measure of stupidity.  But the writer also brought a thin, Gorilla-glass layer of wonder to the page.  Isaacson is no techie--some of the terms are explained in repetition, and for those of us who hear “RAM” and “ROM” and “USB” and glaze over, that was helpful.  For anyone more tech-minded this might fester into the most boring account of Jobs’s genius that you could find.

But not having a tech-bent aspect to it, just a wonder aspect, means you remember the driving force of the other genius--Jobs--and what I now take beyond the last pages of the book: nothing’s impossible (even when it is).

“But then, who am I to say?”

The life of Steve Jobs taught me a lot about what drives me, too, particularly in my least favorable character trait:  my temper.  Surprise, I have one.  If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably encountered it, and if you haven’t, I’ll do my level best to keep it from you, but I will be fighting it all my life, so be warned.  For years I’ve fought with it--hard to say when it started, but it became much harder to control after my mother passed--but I couldn’t really give you clues into why it would surface so strongly and so fiercely.  After finishing this biography, I have a pretty strong clue--my tolerance for “B Players” is about as steady as Jobs’s.  

As Aaron Sorkin stated in his commencement address this year, “More and more we expect less and less of each other.”  Jobs refused to accept less, and I have a hard time with it as well.  Recognition is half the battle, no?  And now that I know why the trigger occurs, and recognizing it from seeing it mirrored in the account of Jobs, means I have a stronger hold on how to improve my approach from that of Jobs.

Curb your antagonism.  Nothing’s impossible (even when it is).  Not a bad take-away from 600+ pages.

Textbook closed, dear reader, and onward, to infinity.