October 7, 2011

“And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”


Like a lot of people recently I read Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. In light of his death many of us felt compelled to revisit it, if only in a vain attempt to try and find some solace upon hearing about the untimely end of such a creative and innovative mind. He is a man who singlehandedly changed the lives of my entire generation, and in 2005 while Steve was giving this speech, I was sitting in the Fleet Center 3,000 miles away in Boston listening to my own commencement speaker talk about all of the possibilities that lay ahead for me. My speaker wasn’t as inspiring as Jobs (current defense secretary Leon Panetta lacks a certain, shall we say, charm), but I can recall sitting there in my black cap and gown thinking that I had really figured out what I loved.

I stumbled across writing the summer before I started high school. As someone who never liked reading (I much preferred to be outside playing kickball than be stuck inside with some book) I decided it might be fun to try to write something I’d enjoy were I to actually make the choice of a book over backyard baseball. The problem, I had realized, was that I had been getting all the wrong books. When people stopped telling me what to read (Bartelby the Scrivener? Seriously?), and I was able to read about things that actually interested me, that’s when reading changed for me. Jobs talks about connecting the dots, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” And I do believe that, and so far, they have. I started writing, which led to me talking to a professor in college, who told me after I mentioned I wanted to be a writer that I should, “get a day job,” and that’s how I found publishing.

Life really can be a hell of a thing in hindsight.

However, what struck me most about Jobs’ speech was that he wrote it after having come back from the brink of facing his own death. Maybe it’s a bit morose, but sometimes I’m on the subway and I look around at all the people reading their newspapers and blackberry’s and iPads (thanks Steve!), and they have their headphones in and they all look tired on their way home as though they’ve just managed to make it through another tedious, routine day at the office and they’re worried about money and their kids and their mortgages and the stock market and their weight, and I think to myself as I look at them: all of these people are going to not be here one day. All of these people right here who I don’t know who all have lives and families and dreams and concerns and who get up every morning and go to work and come home and do it all over again the next day, someday, they’ll all just be…gone.

And then I think the only logical thing to think of next: well, that goes for me, too.

What Jobs says about remembering that you are going to die being the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose, that, over the last few years, has become my mantra. It’s something I repeat whenever I feel my courage start to waver: what have I got to lose?

Nothing. Except, well, maybe everything.

Okay, so maybe loving to write and having faith in that isn’t the greatest return on investment for a college education, but Jobs is right – I refuse to settle. If you don’t stick your neck out for the things you really want you’ll never get them. Life has taught me that. And it’s not immediate and it takes time and perseverance and more often than not you’ll want to give up or give in or walk away – the genius building software in their garage, the musician playing half-empty shows, the writer with a stack of rejection letters (ahem) always asking: when, for crying out loud, is it going to happen?

But the thing is, it already is happening because the work is what matters. Getting back to a story and enjoying the process and having faith, no, trusting in the fact that everything, some day will fall in to place however its meant to.

Life can change (and end) in an instant. We’d be fools, all of us, not to keep fighting for what we love.

I'd hate to imagine what the world would be like if Steve had given up.