I recently came across a commencement speech that Apple's, Steve Jobs, gave at Stanford in 2005.
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If you have a child at or near “college age”, sit them down to watch this.
He elucidated on three main points.
He led off his speech by saying one of the best decisions he made in his life was foregoing the cost and expense of college! This drew quite a stunned, silence from the group of graduates! Too bad he wasn't there to give that speech on the day that these student's considered signing up for their $250,000+ in debt in order to get a piece of paper! Especially when every single important thing that they may have learned is available for free online. MIT's entire course is available for free online.
While, undoubtedly, there are many at Stanford who will get their money's worth, the great majority will be slaves for most of the rest of their lives servicing the debt they undertook in order to get their “Bachelor of Arts” or other completely useless degrees at Stanford. Many students at Stanford and other institutions of “higher education” will go on to bankruptcy in part due to their student loan burden and therein lies the real kicker. There is no other form of government or private sector loan or financial instrument that has such a mandatory, lifelong stigma or debt obligation attached to it, as a student loan. Student loan debt cannot be repudiated under bankruptcy – likely leaving many students as cannon fodder in the future as they are forced to join the military in order to “pay off their debt”.
And this coming at a time when student loan debt has topped credit card debt in the US for the first time.
The second great point by Steve Jobs was about how his first “firing” by Apple was the best thing that ever happened to him. He explained that, “the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again”.
This is a very important point and something I've always believed. In fact, since an early age I've always had it in my mind that I'd never do “anything” for very long. Why? Because in order to test yourself and continue to learn you have to continue to throw yourself into new and challenging situations.
As well, everything, including people, businesses and governments, gets weighed down by bureaucracy and “old ways” after years. The USA is an excellent example of this. Without having “discovered” an entirely new continent whereby new ideas could be tried out, what are the chances that the USA would have been founded in Europe? Nil.
And now that the US is becoming a giant, bureaucratic leviathan, the best hope we have now for free places is where the government recently collapsed or was forced to change, like in the Eastern bloc or in China.
In short, change isn't just good, it's great… and necessary.
Steve Job's third point was about the ultimate kind of change for us humans: death. He spoke about his first brush with cancer and how he thought he had only a short time to live. Here is his comments:
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new… 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 peoples' thinking… 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.”
Those are wise, wise words.
I recently came across this amazing time-lapse video of the earth and its relation to the Milky Way Galaxy.
It is against that vast backdrop that we can all realize that nothing really matters. There are billions of stars and, statistically speaking, likely countless other living creatures in this universe – and nothing you do matters in the great scheme of things. In the end we are all dust. We are here for a short period of time and all that matters is that we enjoy the experience to the fullest.
For youngsters out there trying to figure out how to enjoy life to the fullest, you can start by listening to the wise words from Steve Jobs.
And for those of you unfortunate enough to not have Steve Jobs speak at your commencement and instead, like at Rutgers, had someone like Snooki, thank goodness for the internet so we can all take advantage of wisdom from people like Steve Jobs.
