Steve Jobs is My Hero.
A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. Steve Jobs.
I have to say that Steve Jobs is one of my heroes. There’s a speech he gave on You tube to graduates at Stanford University that it truly inspirational. So, if you get the time today, have a look at this.
He talks about his life and no matter what happened in it (even when it appeared to be going badly), he kept on trying to do the things he loved.
He had to drop out of college because his family couldn’t afford the fees. So he slept on friend’s floors and snuck into classes he enjoyed. One of them was a calligraphy class.
Today, writing beautifully in different scripts seems arcane. (In fact, I use the computer so much that when I have to write in long-hand, a four year-old’s writing looks neater)! But Steve persisted and enjoyed every moment of this dying art.
When he invented the first Mac, he said his love of calligraphy came back to him and as a result, he put all those wonderful fonts onto it that we now take for granted…sans serif, Tahoma, Baskerville Old Face and Copperplate Gothic. What wonderful images those conjure up of plate setting and old-fashioned wood-blocking.
His approach chimes with my 360 WISDOM theory. In this busy, crazy, mad world, we must remember to do the things we love. Sometimes, that’s so hard to forget when we are caught up in day to day living with all its concerns (keeping warm, paying the bills, staying healthy, supporting our children and staying in touch with friends and family.)
Try to remember the things you love and find some space and time to re-engage with them. Somehow, they are your anchors in this ever-changing world. They ground and centre you and remind you of who you are and what makes you unique and special. If it’s cake-baking, writing poetry, going to the races, working-out, playing bridge, singing in a choir, or collecting matchboxes, it’s your love.
We all realise after the event why we did the things we did. Because we in the West see time in a linear way (many cultures in the east see things in a circular fashion and 360 WISDOM is about circles hence the 360 degrees of a circle), then it feels like we are on a fast track moving forwards with no time to branch out or revisit parts of the journey.
In Steve’s speech to the Undergraduates he talks about ‘joining the dots backwards’ as it’s all we can do unless we step off and do things differently.
He was successful because he had a different. Broader perspective on life and its challenges. Instead of trying to be like everyone else, we need diversity, broad experiences and view-points. I’ll be explaining in future blogs how we can design things differently and change our perspective, just like Steve did.
PS This is written in Calibri, but will probably end up as Times New Roman!
