MEDIA MAXIMS

by Ken Auletta

Steve Jobs delivered the Gettysburg Address of graduation speeches in June of 2005. This corporate rebel would not dress for the occasion. His long black robe didn’tcompletely camouflage his jeans and dark sneakers, and only the red sash around hisneck added a splash of color to his pale skin and the pronounced stubble on his face. Itwas a gloriously sunny day, and for 14 minutes Jobs stood behind a lecturn at StanfordUniversity and through round, frameless glasses read a very personal speech, pausingonly to sip from his plastic water bottle or allow the applause to subside. A man famousfor not sharing personal information began by telling his audience he wished “to tell threestories from my life.”“The first story is about connecting the dots.” He recounted how he had beenadopted by working-class parents who never graduated from college. Seventeen yearslater, he attended Reed College but decided to drop out after 6 months when he realizedthat he was bored and was exhausting “all of the money my parents had saved their entirelife.” He spent the next year sleeping on the floor of friends and auditing classes that provoked his curiosity. Of particular interest was a calligraphy class, where he learnedabout spacing between letters and “what makes great typography great…. None of thishad even a hope of practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were

2designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it allinto the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.” It was copied byMicrosoft’s Windows. “If I had never dropped out, I would never have dropped in on thiscalligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography thatthey do.”“My second story is about love and loss.” He described starting in a garage withhis friend Steve Wozniak, of building Apple into a $2 billion company, and of gettingfired at age 30. He felt humiliated, rejected. But over time the “heaviness of beingsuccessful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure abouteverything.” Over the next five years he started a new computer company, NeXT, thatone day allowed him to return to Apple; he acquired and built Pixar as the world’s firstcomputer-animated feature film studio; and he met his wife and started a family. “I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple…Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that theonly thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what youlove… If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”“My third story is about death.” When he was 17 he read a piece of wisdom thatstayed with him: “live each day as if it were your last.” Every day since, he said, “I havelooked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of mylife, would I do what I am about to do today?’” Never forgetting that he would one daydie “is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices inlife.” He told of being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year earlier and warned by hisdoctors he would be dead in a few months. They did a biopsy and discovered that his was

3“a rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.” He had a reprieve, but itforced him to think about death differently. Death, he said, “is the destination we allshare. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likelythe single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to makeway for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you willgradually become the old and be cleared away.…Your time is limited, so don’t waste itliving someone else’s life… Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your owninner voice.”He concluded by describing Stewart Brand’s

Whole Earth Catalog

, which had been a bible to him and others of his generation, but after several issues Brand decidedthey had nothing left to say. On the back of the final issue was a photograph of a countryroad in the early morning, the kind of road adventurous hitchhikers might take. Below the picture in bold letters was printed, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”“It was their farewell message as they signed off… And I have always wished thatfor myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Not a bad way to sum up the life lessons of the Sinatra of business leaders. SteveJobs’ stirring speech provokes me to wonder: What are the enduring lessons we mightdraw from a close look at Google and today’s rapidly changing digital media landscape?I came up with these 25 media maxims:

Passion Wins: