(photo source)
My first story is the story of tying some isolated points together. Within six months of being admitted, I stopped studying at Reed College. Even though I was there for about a year and a half, that doesn't mean I have to study. Well, why did I leave university?
It started even before I was born. My real mother was an unmarried young woman. He was then studying at the university. It is not possible for him to take care of me. He decided to adopt me from someone who had a university degree. The decision was made by a lawyer and his wife to adopt me. But at the very last moment, it turned out that neither of the couple had a university degree, especially a lawyer gentleman who had never crossed the high school boundary. My mother no longer agrees to sign the papers. After many incidents, the couple promised that they would send me to university, then my mother's mind melted a little. He signed the paper and handed it to me.
This happened 16 years later. They really admitted me to the university. But I foolishly chose a university whose tuition costs almost the same as your Stanford. All the savings of my poor parents were going after my education. At the end of six months, I realized, it doesn't make sense. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn't know how university would help me. But I was spending all the money saved by my parents all my life on this meaningless study. So I decided that what I really needed to do was learn how to do it right. The decision may seem daunting, but now that I look back, it seems like it was one of the best decisions of my life. As soon as I left the university I was able to stop taking the courses I needed for my degree but my dislikes, there was no compulsion, I started to find out the subjects of my interest.
The whole thing can't be called romantic in any way. I didn't have any room, I slept on the floor of friends room. I used to earn five cents by returning a bottle of used coke, which I used to buy food. Every Sunday night I would walk seven miles to the Hare Krishna temple just to have a good meal. I liked it very much. It was important to feel good.
Reed College probably taught the best calligraphy in the country at that time. Everything on the campus was done with handwritten posters. Since I was no longer in the middle of normal studies, I could take any course I wanted. I enrolled in a calligraphy course. I learned how to increase and decrease the space between different characters of Serif and San Serif, I learned how to do good typography. It was really beautiful, historical, an art beyond the reach of science. I found the fun in it.
I never thought that this calligraphy thing would come in handy in real life one day. But 10 years later, when we designed our first Macintosh computer, the whole thing worked for me. It was the first computer to use fantastic typography. If I had not taken that calligraphy course, the Mac computer would never have had a variety of characters (typeface) and characters of proportional distance. And since Windows has directly copied this font from Mac, it can be said that no computer has such fonts. If I had not left the university, I would never have been admitted to that calligraphy course, and the computer would probably never have had such beautiful fonts. Of course, it was impossible to tie these isolated incidents together while at the university, but looking back 10 years later, it was very clear.