I have one more thing to say this week about the late Steve Jobs, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of his passing, mostly because I hope it will prompt a really good comments section.
I’ve been working on a separate article for Inc.com about him that will run this weekend. I’ll link to it here on Monday. Today’s newsletter sort of fell out of my research and thinking about that article, and onto the rhetorical floor.
It goes like this. Jobs never graduated from college, but he did attend Reed College in Oregon; he only lasted a short while before dropping out in 1972.
However, instead of heading home after he was no longer officially enrolled, he stuck around for another 18 months. He slept on friends’ floors, returned Coke bottles for the deposits to get some money, and “dropped in” on classes that interested him.
One of those classes was calligraphy. As Jobs explained in the same Stanford speech I talked about earlier this week, it wound up having a profound affect on him:
I learned about serif and sans 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.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. …
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. …
[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.
I feel like we all have stories like this, don’t we? So, as a comment thread for this weekend, can I ask you to connect the dots looking backward?
What’s your equivalent of studying calligraphy? It could be a person you met, or something you studied, or an experience, or an unexpected opportunity. What did you explore simply because it was interesting and you felt called to—with no expectation of payoff—that in retrospect, led to a payoff?
7 other things
Congress passed a short-term funding bill, 254-175, largely along party lines, averting a government shutdown that otherwise would have occurred at midnight. (We’ll do this again in November, apparently; this bill keeps the government going until Dec. 3.) Separately, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., reiterated that Republicans will not vote for any measure that would increase the federal borrowing cap, without which the federal government risks defaulting in the next few weeks. (NPR)
After 15 long years in prison, Juwan Deering, who was convicted of five counts of murder for the fire-related deaths of five children but insisted on his innocence the whole time, walked out of court a free man, after a newly elected prosecutor asked a court to dismiss all charges, saying Deering’s trial had been “totally compromised by misconduct.” (NPR)
A Marine who says he saved a baby in Kabul by lifting the infant over the walls outside Hamid Karzai International Airport, Lance Cpl. Hunter Clark, is now under investigation for appearing on stage with former President Donald Trump at a recent political rally in Georgia. (Task & Purpose)
United Airlines says its number of unvaccinated workers dropped from 593 to 320 after the airline said it would fire those who weren’t vaccinated. Earlier Thursday, Tyson Foods, which also mandates vaccines, said more than 90% of its 120,000-person workforce has been vaccinated against COVID. (CNBC)
TikTok has settled a lawsuit filed by voice actor Bev Standing, who claims the popular app used her voice for its text-to-speech feature without her permission. (The Verge)
A 105-year-old woman who survived the 1918 Spanish flu has died of COVID-related complications. (USA Today)
“A US Army veteran who discovered a hissing alligator outside his house used a wheelie bin to corner and capture the reptile.” (Sky News, Twitter)
NEIGHBORHOOD HERO: This Florida man took matters into his own hands, using a trash can to capture an alligator in front of a home before releasing the reptile into a nearby body of water. abcn.ws/3m9ZxLF
Thanks for reading, as always. Photo credit: myself. Want to see all my mistakes? Click here.
In 2009, my wife's daughters, teenagers who were not big readers, were reading the Stephanie Meyers "Twilight" books about vampires and lost love. Intrigued by books that would motivate her daughters to read, my wife, who was married to another man at the time, decided to read them. They awakened in her a yearning for lost love. More specifically, a particular lost love, me, her college boyfriend. Long story short, she got in touch with me after an 18-year silence and we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary this year. Those books were the trigger.
In the early 90's I found my newly divorced and out of work. I was desperately trying to put my "pieces" back together. I diverged from my regular reading diet of thrill novels and dove into eastern philosophical books. In one of them, the writer made a simple statement . . . "To learn the meaning of life, walk in the forest at night for 30 nights without a light." Well, there was a short (0.65 mile) trail through some woods near my house that came out behind a shopping center. The shopping center had a bagel shop that opened early so, I just woke up early while it was still dark for 30 mornings. I took my short hike in the woods and rewarded myself with a coffee and bagel at the end. No truer words than the statement made by that writer have I ever experienced . . .
The first and most important revelation was about fear. Standing at the dark mouth of the trail every morning the first thing I had to confront was fear. Even after walking partially into the dark woods, I was dealing with palpable fear. The lesson is; You cannot move forward if you succumb to your fears. Fear will make you turn and run, and you will likely harm yourself in the process. The only way forward is to manage your fear and move forward rationally.
The second revelation was about expectation. One morning was well illuminated with a full moon. So, the natural reaction was, this will be easier, I will be able to see. Not so, grasshopper! The bright mottled forest floor was trip hazard after trip hazard because the brightness killed my night vision and the mottling made everything look the same. By contrast, the complete opposite was true of the dark overcast mornings when the expectation was the path would be hard to see. The path those mornings actually seemed to glow and provide guidance.
The next revelation was about perseverance. To navigate the dark path without tripping or running into obstructions required a level of constant concentration. When my focus slipped and I began daydreaming about anything else; my lot in life, my work, my anything, I always immediately tripped or ran into a tree.
The last revelation had to do with gifting and what a true gift is. One morning near the end of my 30-day experience I encountered a large, dark shape lying in the path near the end. As I approached, the shape stirred and moaned. It turned out to be a young man in his early teens wrapped in a blanket. He had run away from home. The 20 or so safety pins he had clipped to his face were a reminder that he was not having an easy go of things. After a brief conversation on the trial, we went to the bagel shop and had breakfast, coffee, and conversation. I sent him home in a cab with a little cash. I never heard or saw him again. Walking home from the bagel shop that morning I experienced the euphoria one can only experience when you anonymously gift without any expectation of a return, to that end, this is the first time I have ever mentioned that part of my experiential episode.