Commencements Speeches - Circling Back to Steve Jobs

Connecting the Dots

So, what do you tell the Class of 2025?

An op-ed in The New York Times ponders that question. Here you have all the economic chaos, murder of much of the knowledge work gunned down by cost-efficiency and generation AI, inflation making it impossible to set up a life and collapsing trust in institutions.

No, the message can’t be soaring like Loretta Lynch’s back in 2016 at American University. Now a partner at law firm Paul Weiss Lynch, a woman of color, told those just entering adulthood to be champions. In 2025, puzzled faces would break out throughout the audience.

But, yes, you want to create a pathway to hope. In 2002, in the commencement speech at Stanford Steve Jobs did just that. He started out with the message Connecting the Dots.

In his young adulthood, like most coming of age, Jobs was lost. College wasn’t for him. But he was alert. He noticed the power of design, especially in calligraphy. Along his eventual journey in revolutionizing how people work he applied what he had observed and incorporated that into the first Macintosh.

That’s the carry-on message the Class of 2025 can take with them: Be alert and then connect the dots in how that can be a sturdy platform for earning a good living.

For example, who doesn’t like to travel. You develop a niche within that niche - national parks or ghost towns. From the film “Nomadland” you get it that you can do the road for peanuts in a run-down van. Maybe you contact Bob Wells for survival tips. You already have the camera phone. There you are a six-figure travel influencer.

But’s that’s also the meme in these troubled times for all generations.

Some alert folks in the distressed retail sector noticed that 1) Big boxes have a lot of returns and overstock they need to unload and 2) With inflation consumers need rock-bottom bargains and for that they’re willing to trade off the experience-economy ambiance.

The folks who connected the dots on that one came up with the Bin Store. It’s wildly successful. BTW, it folds in a gimmick. During a six-day period the prices go down from about $11 to $1. You can grab the good stuff out of bins in a no-frills warehouse the first day or wait until the last to pick over what’s left.

At the end of the commencement speech the audience can break out with a retrofit of lines from the hymn “Amazing Grace”

I once was lost, but now am found,

was blind, but now connect the dots.