MASTER OF CREATIVITY
As you have no doubt heard by now, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer passed away this Wednesday.
Many obituaries have already been written about Jobs by writers far better than I. So, this short ode is about one remarkable aspect of the man: his creativity.
Famously, Steve Jobs is a university dropout. This fact has been used to insinuate that higher education is worthless, yet it really tells only half of the story . Jobs didn't actually drop out of university: he created his own.
Tired of attending classes for which he had no interest, the young Steve Jobs dropped out of formal college and began attending classes he wasn't actually enrolled in. Many of the courses - such as typefaces and calligraphy - were "useless" to him at the time, but would become fundamentally important later when designing the Apple Macintosh computer.
In North America, we have a tendency to disdain anything that is less than 100% and immediately useful. Statistics is a useful course; philosophy is not. Carpentry is a useful course; art history is not. Steve Jobs understood the importance of "pure learning" and the way it expands the mind, enhances creativity, and almost invariably becomes useful at some point in the future.
Steve Jobs, we will miss your genius.
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How to Live before you Die: Steve Jobs
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