디지털 콘텐츠 디지털 미디어

스티브 잡스가 누구인지 아시죠?
애플사의 창업자이자 현재 CEO(중간에 잘린 적도 있었답니다).
미국 대학생들이 테크놀로지 분야에서 제일 제일 존경하는 인물로 뽑은 사람.
빌 게이츠의 Microsoft에 밀려 고전하던 애플을 iMac과  iPod로  기사회생시킨 사람.
애플을 컴퓨터회사에서 디지털 미디어회사로  진화시킨 사람. 
알죠?  i-Tunes는 이제 음악과 동영상을 유통시키는 세계 최대의 디지털 콘텐츠 포털이라는 것.
이제 디지털 콘텐츠를  모바일 기기에 다운받아  이동하며 이용하는 행위를
스티브 잡스가 개발한 i-pod를 일반명사화해서 podcasting이라고  부르는 것.

그  사람이 2005년 스탠포드 대학 졸업식 스피커로 나와서 한 스피치가 있습니다.
유명 대학 졸업식 연사는 아무나 초청받을 수 있는  자리가 아니랍니다.  
모두 세 이야기로 되어 있는데
여기에 그 첫번째 이야기를 소개하지요. 어, 영어로 되어있다구요? 어렵지 않아요. 한번 읽어 보세요.

commencement가 졸업식이고 (미국 대학엔 입학식은 없어요)
drop은 중퇴
biologoical mother는 친어머니
calligraphy는 서체학(동양식으로는 서예)
karma는 업 (요가가 유행하면서 소개된 용어고요, 요즘엔 feng-shui '풍수'라는 말도 심심치 않게 쓰더군요)
이 정도만 알아도 사전 몇번만 찾아보면 쉽게 이해할 수 있어요.

이제는 누구나 성공한 사람으로 기억하는,
하지만 태어나자마자 입양되어 부유하지 않은 양부모에게 자라고
자신의 길을 찾지 못해 대학도 중퇴했던
그 사람 인생의 제 1막의 스토리를 읽어 보실까요?

 

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. 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, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

* 전문은 스탠포드대학 사이트(stanford report)에 있어요.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

* 스티브 잡스의 인생 풀스토리는 iCON 스티브 잡스 (제프리 영 지음, 민음사)에 잘 나와있어요.