Steve Jobs‘ now-famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford should be filed in the same category as Brian’s speech to the unruly mob of dazed followers who, based on nothing, mistakenly believe he’s the new messiah in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Kyle Smith writes in Forbes.
“You’re all individuals!” Brian commands his flock.
“Yes, we’re all individuals!” they chant in unison.
“You’re all different!” Brian cries, since they don’t seem to be getting it.
“Yes, we’re all different!” they reply. (“I’m not,” says one feeble voice, which gets shushed in the general fervor for platitudes.)
Let us turn to the gospel of Steve to the Stanfordites, in which he urged mass uniqueness:
Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love…Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
Whether we’re talking about finding a job or finding a spouse, this is spectacularly poor advice for most people. Holding out for the perfect and drifting restlessly from one bed/desk to another only looks smart from the top down, after you’ve made it to the CEO suite (or married Heidi Klum). If you’re just starting out, what you need to hear is something much more prosaic: Be reliable, work your way up and always be learning. The odds are against your founding one of the biggest brands on earth in your mom’s garage at age 20.
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… Jobs made a fortune ignoring the experts at times, but in the case of his health a foolhardy refusal to acknowledge his relative ignorance may have substantially shortened his life. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking,” Jobs said at Stanford, not yet knowing that his own refusal to acknowledge dogma, or science, would be disastrous. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice,” he urged. But what if others’ opinions are far more informed than your own? Far from imparting hip contemporary wisdom, Jobs was simply echoing the hoary fortune-cookie wisdom of literature’s most infamous blowhard, Polonius in Hamlet, who urged, “To thine own self be true.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2011/10/12/steve-jobs-was-a-lousy-role-model/
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