Dropping out of school is good thing, says Steve Jobs

Jobs attended Reed College in Portland but, which we believe is the background to the Everywhere Girl photograph below, dropped out after eight months because it was too expensive for his family. He said that it was one of the best decisions he ever made because it forced him to be creative.

After he dropped out, he was so poor that he had to live off five cent pop bottle recycling deposits and free food offered by Harold Krishna, a well known godling of these parts.

Of course there are some in Yorkshire who would think he was lucky to have a regular income, as many of them had to live in crisp packets by the side of the road. That includes the editor of this rag, Mike Magee [It's true, I did. Ed.]

Somehow, Steve managed to scrape up enough fizzy bottles to attend a calligraphy class. His friends thought he was daft going to calligraphy classes, but he went anyway. He said it proved useless until the day when that painstaking attention to detail - including mastering different "fonts" - was what set Macintosh apart from its competitors. We thought that was Adobe, but never mind.

He told the commencement ceremony, if he had never dropped out he might never have dropped in on calligraphy. The world would be a different place and there would be no iPods, and no reassuringly expensive Macs. The fabric of the world would be totally altered.

He also said that his recent bout with a rare form of pancreatic cancer proved to him that you had to live life to the full. "Your time is limited so don't let it be wasted living someone else's life," he told 5000 graduates, alumni and family, here. µ

* INQfact Nick Farrell used to be a teacher. Mike Magee got expelled at school at the age of 16. Go figure.