Steve Jobs as Howard Roark

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s 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.”
​        - Steve Jobs, Stanford University, 2005

These words of advice, spoken by Steve Jobs to graduates of Stanford University could just as well have been spoken by Howard Roark.  They are pure Objectivism.  Steve Jobs lived by this philosophy all his life.  His academic life echoes that of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, to the extent that six months into his university degree he dropped out, preferring to attend only those lectures which interested him.  One course which caught his eye was calligraphy, a subject which fascinated him, but didn’t seem to have any practical relevance.  Except that, ten years later, when he was designing the first Mac computer everything he had learned about serif and sans-serif came back to him, and he made sure that the first Mac had beautiful typography.  Microsoft copied the Mac, with the result that the influence of his course in calligraphy can be seen in every computer in use today.  The video of Steve Job’s address to the graduates of Stanford University, all of whom, unlike Jobs or Roark, got their degrees, is as inspiring as is the fictional story in The Fountainhead.