Steve Jobs: the first Portlandian?

Steve Jobs, 1982 (image courtesy Elephant Journal)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Steve Jobs didn't come to Portland for youthful retirement. But his inspired drop-out from college may be an indication of a larger collective spirit.

In the days and weeks after an iconic figure's death, it's natural to join in on the veneration, and to feel some sense of broader connection. Since  Jobs' death was announced last week, we've seen comparisons to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, heard tributes calling him the most original and forward thinking of corporate CEOs. And long before his death, Jobs also came to represent the value and necessity of counter-intuitive thinking: that customers cannot always express what they need, for example, or that changing your mind is a sign of strength rather than weakness.

Here in Portland, Jobs' ties to the city have already been celebrated: that he was Reed College's most famous dropout, for example - leaving after just six months, but not actually leaving - and that the metro area's sizable tech industry owes much of its life to Apple. But maybe there's something larger in Jobs' life to sieze upon as somehow quintessentially our own. Was he, in fact, the first Portlandian?

One of the most oft-repeated lines from the Portlandia TV show is a fake slogan for the city: "Where young people go to retire." The joke is meant to alternately mock and celebrate the fact that young people have moved here in droves despite traditional motives, such as the availability of employment (or lack thereof), being veritable non-factors or even a discouragment. But what if we turned around that idea? What if Portland isn't where young people go to "retire", but to opt out of the traditional path?

In a photo from 1982 (seen at the top of this post), Jobs - by then a multimillionaire - was shown in his largely empty living room. "All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had," he said later. Jobs spent several years living in an unrenovated old mansion, and even at the time of his death was residing in an unremarkable suburban Palo Alto house. He was following his passion, which happened to make him rich and famous. Everything else was secondary. And trophies demonstrating your wealth and superiority were superflous. I can't help but wonder if that ideology is inherent to this place.

In an Oregonian essay from 1995, columnist David Sarasohn called this region "The Gore-Tex Vortex", suggesting that it wasn't just the rainy climate that left Oregon unspoiled and gave birth to a more democratic place with raincoats outnumbering pinstriped suits.

Sarasohn cited a Depression-era Works Progress Aministration guide to the state that read, "Oregon is still the most unspoiled and uncluttered spot in America, and partly because the gold rushes of California and Alaska left it undisturbed." The same, he argued, was true at the end of the 20th century, with aerospace and cyberspace industries in California and Seattle making stampedes on either side of us.

"The most famous legend of the Oregon settlement is about the fork in the road west, with the sign pointing to Oregon and the gold dust trail leading to California," Sarahson added. "The moral, allegedly, is that the people who could read came to Oregon....Actually, the real moral is that people who wanted to be rich and famous went to California--and still do....In the great population shifts across America, from the conquistadors to the condominiums, there have been two separate, contradictory urges: one set of migrants wants to get rich, and the other set wants to get away. One urge leads to California, the other to Oregon."

Steve Jobs didn't come to Oregon to build Apple into a corporate juggernaut. He came here to become inspired. And perhaps appropriately, given the theme of taking the less-traveled road and not the gold-dusted path, Jobs famously dropped out of Reed College after six months, only to find greater inspiration on his own at that same school.

"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," Jobs recalled in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. "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."

"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."

Reed College (photo by Brian Libby)

"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. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. 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.”

Jobs and his connection with Portland and Reed and the dropout's path remind me of "Portlandia"

When "Portlandia" first premiered earlier this year, I was struck most not by the satires fashioned on the show, which were often funny and spot-on, but by certain responses in the media. In The New Yorker, for example, Meredith Blake wrote of the city's "peculiar combination of self-seriousness and prolonged adolescence." Another New Yorker writer, John Seabrook, described Portland as a city where people "pretend not to care about money and worldly ambition."

Clearly, even when you write for what is hands down the nation's smartest magazine, it's possible to completely miss the point.

It isn't that the quintessential Portlandian seeks to be without money or rejects ambition. Rather, it's that these are not the driving force. Steve Jobs understood that the path to innovation and fulfilment is not always a direct one. Sometimes, you have to allow for and be open to a calligraphy class - other some other inspiration - that will change how you view the world.

This confusing with means and ends by those who would judge Portlandians, in turn, also reminds me of one of Jobs' most famous quotes, on the inherent nature of design. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like," he said. "Design is how it works." If you're a 25-year-old Harvard grad working now as a barista instead of in a cubicle, that's just the superficial, surface level description of what you're doing. Maybe being a barista is your own caligraphy class.

"More than any of his other accomplishments, his creations or his branding brilliance, the thing I admired most about him was that he loved what he did," writes Jeanette Mulvey in Business News Diary. "His excitement and enthusiasm was often called charisma, charm and drive. Ultimately, though, he was really just a guy who found his niche and worked it for everything it was worth. Finding a way to do what you love – even if that something is cutting grass or towing cars – is the secret to being great at what you do."

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