No Respect for the Status Quo

As I was working on the redevelopment of my portfolio website over the summer, I stumbled across an old .rss file on the computer, a file type developed 25 years ago. Normally you'd utilize the URL to gather web feeds, not the file. Yet somehow it made its way onto the jumble of files I was cleaning out and upon selection, the .rss file had a peculiar thumbnail with a famous quote... or rather quote and speech on it. It was one of those default thumbnails for files that wouldn't normally have a preview image like a .jpg. It's a bit of an Easter Egg. I googled a bit, didn't really find anyone writing about the .rss thumbnail specifically, but it certainly appeared in TextEdit, a native Mac application, 10 years ago in similar fashion. It's no doubt an homage to Apple's founder, but it was a passage I wasn't familiar with before despite working on Macs since 2009. You can see this thumbnail easily yourself if you're on a Mac operating system, by renaming any file to ".rss" at the end. Don't rename any file you aren't willing to corrupt, just to be on the safe side.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Now isn't that something? Doesn't it get you fired up? Certainly did for me. The text is partially from Apple's "Crazy Ones Think Different" campaign, with some of the text it seems, not making its way into the final cut. This bit of inspiration also ties in really well with Steve Jobs' powerful 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, which I highly recommend a watch. In 2024, I'm honestly shocked it hasn't even hit the 1M view mark. The timing of my discovery with this text is a bit uncanny given the circumstances of all that was happening in my personal life at the time and it's just one of those things I felt I needed to hear. I'm rich to have come across it.

I learned several things about his life in his commencement speech that made him out to be a much more humble person than I thought: He was put up for adoption because his mother felt he needed to be raised by college-educated parents, he ended up being passed on because he wasn't a girl like they wanted. Additionally, it's common knowledge that Jobs was among many who were famous for dropping out of college, but he still attended some classes. One of these was a calligraphy class which he thought would have no practical application in his life, but ended up changing the way we see type on personal computers:

I learned about serif and san 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.

That little tidbit resonated with me in the way that I just happened to have dropped into a brand-identity and logo class, a non-requirement for my major, but I learned so much and grew so much in that class. While my work wasn't portfolio-worthy as I stumbled my way around picking up graphic design skills, it ignited a hidden passion that would serve me well later in my profession.

I'd like to end this post with Jobs' final poignant story on death and the final arc of his speech. As we all grow a bit older, we all wise up to the fact that our time is ticking, that the clock only runs faster the older we get. When going from 5 years old to 10 years old, time passed slower because 5 years on was effectively half of your decade-old self. But what's 30 to 35 or 45 to 50? More a fraction of your life, a blip by comparison to your childhood self. The metric of our lifetime is just that, finite. We have limited reserves of our time, our energy and the resources with which to put into action our passions hoping it'd be a fruitful adventure. Whatever time we have left, it's best spent nurturing our growth.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.