“The Noise of Other Opinions”
Before there was a MacWorld, there was a Gutenberg Festival. It was an annual celebration of the printing trade, aptly named for a blacksmith named Johann Gutenberg, who was born in 1398.
He was the guy who introduced the printing press to a world that was still making Bibles one at a time, with a feather pen and an inkwell. This little invention, of course, became not just the cure for monks with hand cramps, but the beginning of mass communication, education, religion and anything else passed on to other human beings beyond earshot. It was the catalyst of the Enlightenment, it gave birth to the Renaissance, it was a big deal, the basic concept hung around for 600 years.
In 1984, Apple brought a Macintosh to the Gutenberg Festival, and the world paused. I didn’t buy in at first. I was a professional. I had already spent a couple years learning the front-end of the printing business. I knew that pre-press began when a trained typographer input and exported coded text onto an eight-inch roll of film, ran it through a three-chemical processor, gave it to a paste-up guy who spread hot wax on its back, sliced it with an x-acto knife and rubbed it in place on a blue-gridded, light-weight cardboard taped down to a modified drafting table where we added high-contrast stats from a graphics camera ... What could be easier than that?
Macintosh was telling us that it was all going to be done on one computer? Publishing would go digital? That I would trade my x-acto blade for a mouse? Send my pages through the sky? Not me, I bought a new photo-typesetting machine in 1984 for the price of a fully-equipped Cadillac... it was obsolete before I even paid it off. Seemingly overnight, Apple turned a trade into an art, and we had to learn it all over. I never bet against Steve Jobs again, even when he was fired the next year. He could see the potential of things that didn’t exist, maybe we all can.
While he was redefining my profession (and I think about five others) Steve Jobs left an exclamation point on a message to my generation ... the American Dream is alive and well. He took away our excuses; That times are hard. That all the great things have been done. The odds are against us, that we don’t have the capital, the government’s in the way. He made them all mute.
Jobs created the most valuable company in the world from the humble garage of the American middle class. He found a better way, and that’s what the Dream is to me. Or at least half of it.
The other half, of course, is finding the courage and discipline to pursue it. The opportunity to rise above our given station in life is a right in this country, it comes with the citizenship. But all the ideas in the world are nothing without the passion to see them through. We respect the ones who throw it all in, who hocked their cars because they had a vision that woke them in the morning and they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, let anyone stop them from seeing it done. We need those guys. They built this country, they’ll bring it back. We can never seek to hinder the creative spirit of American ingenuity that thrives in a limitless sky. We are blessed with many freedoms, but I believe it is the freedom of enterprise that feeds them.
When Jobs addressed the Stanford Graduating class in 2005, he rang a message true. It was the
message of someone who had seen the future, stared death in the face and came back with a vision.
“Your time is limited,” he said, “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 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 ...”
Happy 2012.
Don Kindred
Publisher
