Snopes is an excellent resource for verifying stories people swear are true but sound suspect. Virtually every time I get an e-mail forward that looks fishy, I’ll check it out on snopes, and nine times out of ten, they’ve already done the research or are currently working on it. I’m subscribed to their what’s new list, so I hear about the latest research they’re working on. A few days ago one of the articles caught my interest. The claim was:
Drawing from three stories about his life, Steve Jobs delivered a moving commencement address to Stanford’s 2005 graduating class.
Their research confirmed it was true, which made me curious about what he said. I read it and was impressed by his candor as well as the useful advice he gave to the graduating class from his own experiences. It’s not long, but it gave me a lot to think about. I admire his ability to turn adverse conditions into strengths and I highly recommend reading it.
If you’re interested, here is the complete commencement address hosted on one of Stanford’s very own web servers.
I’d suggest downloading the audio file of his speech, available here.
I second your praising comments. A couple of weeks ago, I took a long early-morning walk with this loaded in my MP3 player — three words: “food for thought”.
(By the way, I’ve only got one minor gripe with it, and that is: “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, its likely that no personal computer would have them.”)
Thanks for the link to the MP3. I agree, it’s a bit presumptuous to suppose that no one else would have ever thought to add additional typefaces, but you never know. It’s possible that we would all still be using courier.