--START YOUR TIMER--
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest
universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve
ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s
it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the
first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really
quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college
graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. 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. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the
middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said:
“Of course.” My biological mother 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 a few months later 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 parents’ savings were being
spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I
wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And
here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to
drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking
back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. 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 interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’
rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7
miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna
temple. I loved it. 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. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully
hand calligraphed. 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. I learned about serif and san serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about
what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that
science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating...
--STOP YOUR TIMER--
