Steve Jobs connecting the dots

Reflections on his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

This is one of the greatest speeches by anyone at any time in any language:

If it had been by Pericles as recalled by Thucydides, it would be immortal. It will probably be lost in the information deluge of the digital era. Its structure is brilliant—three personal “stories” organized as connecting the dots; love and loss; and death in life. He is wearing a sweat shirt and jeans under a graduation cloak he never had himself, a reminder that these are lessons he has learned from a self-made life.

His audience—with only a few exceptions, privileged children who will struggle to make their own life against the burdens of expectation laid on them—laugh and cheer at the punch lines. But what will they take to heart from the speech and make their own? Jobs says that, having just survived what was initially thought to be certain death soon (pancreatic cancer), he hopes to live for a few more decades. He died six years later, leaving a legacy of outstanding entrepreneurship that made him a more effective corporate monopolist than Bill Gates. Like all great speeches, this one is riddled with contradiction concealed by rhetoric.

I too believe that I made my own life; but after passing eighty, I am beginning to connect the dots, and now realise that there are too many coincidences for that to be true. Steve tells us that we cannot connect these contingencies in advance, only in retrospect. A previous year’s flirtation with sure death allowed him to achieve clarity on this point; me too. There is plenty in our moment of history to concern parents who hope for their children’s future. I worry for my “magical twins”—two daughters born 28 years apart on the same day and at the same hour whose burden is their middle-class upbringing.

They could find it impossible to internalize the outlook that I share with Steve Jobs—a life of unshakeable self-belief conducive to taking extreme risks. This allowed us both to understand eventually that inevitable death is life’s supreme invention and not to be feared, since it ensures room for replacement and change. It encouraged us to understand that planning does not work. If each day could be our last, it pays not to worry about what we might lose if we are careless, choosing to make the life we love now, not one defined by others.

He concludes with a quote by Stewart Brand, creator of the pioneering Whole Earth Catalog, taken from its final issue in the 1970s: “Stay hungry; stay foolish.” That is a message that Gen Z—the first generation after the boomers to be a global majority, two billion out of eight billion, most of them African—will find it hard to absorb when they face a mountain of public and private debt and an inverted population pyramid, while knowing that theirs are dire circumstances unheard of in the rich countries during the last century’s second half. Our planet’s survival is in their hands.