Tag Archives: President Obama

There’s been quite the (deserved) hubbub over the choice of Governor Rick Snyder as the speaker for this year’s commencement. The governor will be congratulating this year’s graduating class at the same time that he is promoting major cuts to our state’s public education system. Isn’t it ironic? I’d like to share a few of my favorite commencement addresses, and I’m sure they’ll be more inspiring than the governor’s

And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

When given the choice between fame and glory, take glory. Glory has a way of sneaking up on fame and stealing its lunch money later anyway.

Life might very well be long, keep your eye on the horizon and live in a way that you will be proud of. You will sleep more. You’ll be a better partner. You’ll be a better mom. You’ll be a better friend. You’ll be a better boss, and you will not have to remember any complicated lies to brag about at the old age home because you can brag about the truth of your well-lived life.

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 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 ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. 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.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

What is certain -– what has always been certain -– is the ability to shape that destiny.  That is what makes us different. That is what sets us apart.  That is what makes us Americans -– our ability at the end of the day to look past all of our differences and all of our disagreements and still forge a common future.  That task is now in your hands, as is the answer to the question posed at this university half a century ago about whether a free society can still compete.