Kelsey Zimmerman wrote in yesterday’s paper, “From everything I’ve seen here in my two years and some odd months at Princeton, our greatest unconscious collective longing is to be the next Steve Jobs. It’s this little secret voice inside all of us that influences us to push harder and do more in every aspect of our lives.”
While I doubt that all students harbor the longing Zimmerman identifies, she’s probably right about at least a few. Some of our classmates may be among the most talented computer science majors in the world, and they’ll no doubt go on to do great things with their skills. But leaving a legacy like Jobs’s — be it through innovations in computing or in any other field — is a goal for which no university, Princeton included, can possibly prepare its students. Only a rarefied few around the world ever manage it.
That’s because Jobs was more than a skilled professional. Though he was indeed a great CEO, we remember him today not as a tech executive but as a culture-shaper. And the careers of such individuals tend to be as unpredictable as the societal shifts they bring about.
Often these men and women work in creative fields where success is hardly guaranteed. A singer with a unique sound might capitalize on a hit song to build a successful career, or he might crash and burn as a one hit wonder. A talented actress might produce decades of great work on the silver screen, or she might get typecast after a breakout role.
Those whose careers are tied to culture need to have a lot of factors on their side in order to succeed: luck, talent and the intuition to see cultural pivot points on the horizon. It’s the special few for whom those elements align perfectly who can transcend success or celebrity and become cultural icons.
It is through this lens of cultural impact that most people remember Steve Jobs, which explains the outpouring of emotion that has surrounded his death — the makeshift memorials outside Apple stores, the tribute videos, the memorial websites, blog posts and tweets. Jobs didn’t invent portable music players, but his were the ones with the intuitive interface we all wanted to jog with. Jobs didn’t invent the smartphone, but his brought the mobile Internet to the masses. Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer or the tablet, but his were the ones we wanted to use at home. He brought us technology we were happy to use every hour of every day of our lives, always at just the moment that we were ready for it.
Some have said Jobs’ genius was that he saw his industry’s future before his peers, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Anyone can dream up some vision of the future. Jobs’ greatness lay in the fact that he was able to move us far enough along that we could see his vision as clearly as he could — both through savvy marketing and through intuitively designed products. And in convincing society to buy into his vision, he made it a reality.
Formal education can improve some of our skills. But it’s this ability not just to hold a finger to the winds of cultural change but to be able to blow them oneself that is so difficult to teach. That’s not to say that Princeton can’t prepare us well to shape the world in all sorts of ways. The classes of 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 surely include many future CEOs, journalists, policymakers, architects and engineers whose work will live well beyond them. The institution is designed to elicit that from us — work that is greater than the individuals who produce it. It opens up predictable, well-defined career paths for us to take as professionals in pursuit of that work. And its graduates will live on through that work long after they die.
But educational institutions can’t give us the ability to shift the tides of culture — the ability to sense when society is ready for a push and the will to risk our careers on that conviction. The best most of us can hope is to come out of here with an understanding of those tides so that we can ride them to some modest success. For the 99.99% of us who won’t be the next Steve Jobs, that should be more than enough to help us make some impact in our chosen fields.
The other .01% won’t need Princeton to impart those skills anyway. Steve Jobs was a dropout, after all.
Jacob Reses is a Wilson School major from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.
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