WHY IS STEVE JOBS' SPEECH STILL SO POPULAR?
Article #17
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“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it, no big deal, just three stories.”
Steve Jobs, Stanford University, June 2005.
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I was chatting to a guy recently. Smart guy. Runs his own company and it wouldn’t surprise me if that company becomes outrageously successful. And if it’s not that one, it’ll be the next one. It’s only a matter of time before he hits it.
Anyway, we got to talking about Steve Jobs. The conversation went a little something like this:
Him: I watched Job’s Stanford speech again last night.
Me: The graduation one?
Him: Yeah.
Me: Good speech.
Him: 40 odd million views.
Me: Really?
Him: I always wondered if he hadn’t died would that speech be as popular still?
Me: I reckon it would.
Him: No chance.
Me: Why?
Him: When he died he became this Jesus like cult figure.
Me: Still a good speech though.
Him: Sure, but if he was around today, it wouldn’t have 40 million hits.
Me: No?
Him: Nah. It’s because of the iphone and Apple’s second coming. If it wasn’t for that no-one would give a sh*t.
He’s right about one thing. The man Bill Burr once referred to as ‘Nerd Jesus’ is no longer a mere mortal. He has passed into legend and there he will remain, no longer bound by the mere mortal mundailities the rest of us must endure.
And that got me thinking. What makes the story Steve Jobs told, on the 12th of June 2005, to a bunch of giddy Stanford students, still so compelling to so many?
Well, let’s break it down.
1. STRUCTURE
In storytelling, structure is everything. Like the solid foundation to a house. But don’t take my word for it. John Yorke, author of the brilliant Into The Woods: Why Stories Work & Why We Tell Them puts it like this:
“Storytelling has a shape. It dominates the way all stories are told and can be traced back not just to the Renaissance, but to the very beginnings of the recorded word. It’s a structure that we absorb avidly whether in art-house of airport form.”
And Job’s speech has a perfect three-act structure. Or should I say, the three stories he tells in his speech each have a perfect three-act structure with the ‘ol reliable set-up, conflict and resolution.
And the above three stories fit perfectly into one story which also has a perfect five-act structure, like a movie would.
If we were to do a compare and contrast with Christopther Nolan’s 2008 movie, The Dark Knight, we can see the exact same underlying structure there also.
As John Yorke pointed out, this classic structure is one we know instinctively and one we absorb without even thinking about it. Far from being three random stories, Job’s underlying structure, like that of Christopher Nolan’s, is perfectly balanced.
2. THE CIRCLE OF CHANGE
We could talk about this all day, but put simply, without change there is no story. Frodo must leave the shire, undertake his ring bearing quest, and return forever changed. Russell Crowe’s Gladiator must go from general to slave, undertake his vengeance fuelled quest, and emerge as a gladiator. Batman must face his greatest foe, rid Gotham of chaos, and emerge forever changed as The Dark Knight.
And it’s no different for Steve Jobs. Except he is the hero of his own story. He steps off the leafy path of college life, begins his quest to find his own path then finally, like Frodo, returns to his shire, in his case his beloved Apple, an utterly changed man.
If you are pitching a show to Netflix, they won’t even blink at your pitch unless you can clearly show your circle of change. They even include it in their pitch guide to creators.
Twelve months before Netflix offered streaming for the first time, Steve Jobs had that old circle of change down cold.
3. THEME
A good story tells as much about the storyteller as it does about the story. And great stories all have this in common: they are exploring an idea. They are putting forward a thesis, conjuring an anti-thesis and emerging with a synthesis.
Again, let’s take a look at The Dark Knight.
Nineteen and a half minutes into that movie, there is a scene around a restaurant table featuring Bruce Wayne, his date Natasha, Gotham’s District Attorney (DA) Harvey Dent and his date, Assistant DA, Rachel Dawes.
The conversation goes like this:
Natasha: How could you want to raise children in a city like this [Gotham]?
Bruce: I was raised here, I turned out ok.
Natasha: I’m talking about the kind of city that idolises a masked vigilante [Batman].
Dent: Gotham City is proud of an ordinary citizen standing up for what’s right.
Natasha: Gotham needs heroes like you, elected officials, not a man who thinks he’s above the law.
Bruce: Exactly. Who appointed the Batman?
Dent: We did. All of us who stood by and let scum take control of our city.
Natasha: This is a democracy, Harvey.
Dent: When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and elect one man to protect the city. And it wasn’t considered an honour, it was considered a public service.
Rachel: Harvey, the last man they appointed to protect the republic was Ceasar and he never gave up his power!
Dent: Ok, fine. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Nolan spends roughly the next two hours of that movie exploring Dent’s hero-villain thesis.
In the end, Dent dies a villain, but is mythologised as a hero. Batman doesn’t die a hero, but becomes something else entirely. A synthesis if you will, neither hero nor villain. He is re-born in the form of what Gotham desperately needs him to be: a silent guradian, a watchful protector, a dark knight.
And, yep you guessed it, Steve Jobs is also asking a question and using story to explore a possible answer.
He goes on to make reference to this theme in each of his three stories.
At the end of story 1, about joining the dots he states: “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. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.”
In story 2, about love and loss he states: “Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick – don’t lose faith.” He goes on to say “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.”
In story 3, about death and life he states: “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.”
4. MYTHOLOGY
Alfred Hitchcock once said: “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
Top Gun 2 wouldn’t have been as much craic if it included Maverick’s daily downward dog routine, just so his sixty-year-old torso wouldn’t freeze up mid fly-by.
The same goes for story. In his book Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward, Jeffrey S. Young takes the Hollywood out of the journey Job’s presents to the kids at Stanford.
He argues if you had met Job’s in the early 70’s you would have met a guy who just moved back in with his parents while working a night shift job at Atari.
When Jobs pitched the idea of designing computer circuit boards to his friend, Steve Wozniak, the plan was to make the boards for $25 dollars apiece and flip them for $50, to local wireheads. Both Wozniak and Jobs were in full-time employment and hadn’t a notion of quitting their jobs.
As legend has it, Job’s swanned in barefoot into a Mountain View computer store run by a guy called Paul Terrell, trying to flogg the circuit boards. Terrel wasn’t buying. What Terrel was actually in the market for was fully assembled computers. He was willing to pony up $500 for each and wanted delivery as soon as. And like any good entrepreneur, Jobs said “no problem”. And just like that, Apple was born.
Young makes a key point here: “Their plans [Wozniak and Jobs] were circumspect and small-time. They weren’t dreaming of taking over the world.”
Steve doesn’t get into those weeds of this fact in his speech. The period where he and Steve Wozniak started in a garage to Job’s getting fired is condensed from 5:48 to 6:06.
Jobs co-opts an observable set of truths from his life into a personal mythology. His story is bending to the structure, not the other way around. And therein lies its power.
But don’t for a minute think that Steve Job’s was dreaming up this blockbuster. As Joseph Campbell outlines in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, myth and dream are symbols in the deep crevasses of our subconscious, but “in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.”
Maybe too valid for some. Convicted Theraonos founder Elizabeth Holmes thought all she had to do was mimic Job’s drop-out story (story 1), wear black turtlenecks and the world would believe she was Jobs re-born. And for a while deep pocketed venture capitalists did, until her dream became a nightmare.
I’m sure once she gets out of Camp Bryan federal prison she’ll waste little time in co-opting her nightmare back into myth.
5. AUTHENTICITY
“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it, no big deal, just three stories.” For a guy who was CEO of a successful company and founder of Pixar, the most successful animation company in the world at that time, it’s a pretty unassuming way to begin a speech.
On a platform such as that one, on a hot summers day, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, one would be forgiven for playing to the gallery. Feeling like this is your moon speech moment and that your words must be piercing and hit them punters like a rocket.
Jobs didn’t do that. He allowed his rougher edges to be seen, or at least was unafraid to show some vulnerability. In story 1 about being a drop-out, he was open about being put up for adoption. In story 2, about love & loss, he was open about being fired from the very company he founded and in story 3, about death & life, he wasn’t ashamed to admit he didn’t know what a pancreas was.
Granted, there is nothing monumental in any of those admissions, but it endears him to us. As he is the protagonist of his own story, he understands that he must allow us, the audience, to see ourselves in him.
If his synthesis is to land, he must show how conflicted he was, how he faced uncertain times, how he stared down his mortality. And how he came out the other side, still hungry, still foolish.
Steve also understood that without the uncertainty, the doubt, the crisis moment, there is nothing to hold an audience’s attention. We all love a struggling protagonist. That’s why we’re so drawn to the flawed detective, the superhero with a dark edge, the chemistry teacher turned drug baron.
And once that edge, that vulnerability is matched with an active desire, we’re hooked from the off.
In The Shawshank Redemption, while money laundering for the prison’s ruthless warden, Andy Dufrane took part in more white-collar crime within the walls of Shawshank prison that he ever did on the outside. Yet, we’re willing to turn a blind eye to all that. Because his active goal is to get busy livin’, to reject the brutal realities of the grey reality around him and refuse to be stripped of hope.
And who the hell wouldn’t be rooting for that?
Jobs didn’t gloss over the rough edges and at the same time challenges us to listen to that inner voice, to place a tentative foot on the road less travelled, just like he did.
And even if he is a wildly successful millionaire, we want his story to end well. Because through his humility, through his struggle, we come to recognise ourselves.
THE JOBS LEGACY
Back to the conversation with my friend:
Him: And another thing, he has that Senna halo.
Me: The Senna wha?
Me: Ayrton Senna died way to soon right? And since then he has been mythologised.
Me: You mean in Brazil?
Him: In Brazil he’s a saint. But everywhere else he’s a legend, a myth. Dying before your time means you can’t make any more mistakes.
He’s got a point. Jobs died at 56. His carefully crafted personal mythology can now be co-opted by others. He died before Apple were accused of turning a bling eye to forced labour in China. He died before sustainability became more than just a buzzword. He died before the iphone went from being the invention of the century, to being the distraction of the century. Moreover, his prize invention, along with the rise of social media, is linked to the re-wiring of an entire generation of young people and not for the better.
Job’s iphone changed the world. But it also changed a myriad of other things we never saw coming.
And in a way, his legacy has not been tarnished by that, for the simple reason that he wasn’t around long enough for it. And in 2005, during that speech, the iphone launch was a full two years away, hitting the shelves for the first time in June 2007.
Death wipes the slate clean for most and legacy can be complicated.
Mythology isn’t. In mythology, our hero ventures deep into the dark woods to slay the deadly dragon and emerge changed forever and with order restored to the world outside once more.
Jobs was a spiritual man, a man who understood Newton’s third law, that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Surely, he would have considered some downside to the iphone? Surely, he saw the winds of change coming when, in March 2006, Yahoo offered Mark Zuckerberg a cool $1 Billion for a fledgling platform called Facebook.
We’ll never know. One thing is for sure, Job’s was no saint. Then again, either was Ayrton Senna. When we put mythology to one side there are cracks to be found in all of us, some deeper than others.
When it came to story though, Steve Job’s was a master. Sure, we can’t separate the story from the storyteller, but for my two cents, the main reason his speech has endured is because it has the touch of the master’s hand.
Maybe the last word should go to him: "The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come."
The End.