In 2005, Steve Jobs stood before a graduating class at Stanford and told them three stories. The Society has been thinking about that speech, and about what it might mean here, in the village.
The speech is famous now, and rightly so. Jobs did not offer a grand thesis. He told three stories from his own life, plainly, and let the graduates draw their own conclusions. The Society admires this. The Society does not always manage it.
The first story was about connecting the dots. Jobs had dropped out of college, and with nothing better to do, sat in on a class about calligraphy — the shapes of letters, the spaces between them, the kind of thing that seemed at the time to have no practical use whatsoever. Years later, designing the first Macintosh, it all came back. The dots, he said, connect only in hindsight. You cannot see the pattern looking forward. You can only trust that one will appear.
The Society finds this idea unreasonably comforting. It spends a great deal of its time on things of no obvious use — the precise documentation of a closed produce stand, the cataloguing of which corridor leads to which Home Depot, the maintenance of a Doodle Pool whose purpose no current Member can fully explain. The Society has long suspected these efforts will, one day, connect into something meaningful. It has no evidence for this. It continues anyway.
The second story was about love and loss. Jobs built Apple and was then forced out of the company he founded — publicly, humiliatingly, at thirty. He has said it was the best thing that could have happened to him. Freed of the weight of being the established man, he entered the most creative period of his life. The lesson he drew was simple and hard: the only way to do great work is to love what you do, and if you have not found it yet, keep looking, and do not settle.
Several Members returned to this part of the speech. It is possible to have the address and the routine one wanted and still feel unsettled about the work. Jobs's encouragement to keep looking was welcome.
The third story was about death. Jobs had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and he spoke about mortality not morbidly but as a tool — the most clarifying one he knew. Remembering that he would soon be gone, he said, was the single best way to cut away everything that did not matter: the fear of embarrassment, the small vanities, the expectations of others. What remained was only what was truly important. Death, he told the graduates, is very likely the best invention of life.
The third story stayed with the Committee after the speech ended. Conversation was quieter when they returned to it, and nobody tried to turn it into a resolution.
Jobs closed by quoting a line from the final issue of an old publication he had loved as a young man: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was a farewell message from people who were, themselves, signing off. He passed it to the graduates as his wish for them.
The Society has decided to adopt it as well, though it confesses it had always assumed the phrase originated with Jobs himself, and was mildly disappointed to learn otherwise. It has elected to keep admiring the line regardless. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
— A Society Reflection. The Committee suggests the speech is worth your fifteen minutes, in full, in his own words.