“Vi kan sagtens lege, at der ikke er forskel på mænd og kvinder i Danmark. Den leg kan vi sagtens lege. Det er bare ikke rigtigt.”
Sofie Linde
Den retoriske situation
Taleren, Steve Jobs, er stifter af store, succesrige firmaer, bl.a. Apple Inc. og animationsstudiet Pixar. Talen afholdes den 12. juni 2005 for årets dimittender på Stanford University.
Det er en gammel tradition i USA, at man får en kendt, livserfaren person til at afholde en sådan dimissionstale på de anerkendte universiteter. Jobs har den rette adkomst som taler, fordi han har livserfaring; han har oplevet både modstand og medgang, og alligevel har han formået at skabe noget stort.
Der er her tale om en lejlighedstale med træk fra den politiske talegenre. Talens funktion er at bekræfte det værdifællesskab, som Jobs mener, de nu bør træde ind i, og dermed er formålet at sende dem godt videre i livet.
Dimittenderne er som udgangspunkt et velvilligt publikum, fordi de er genstand for Jobs’ hyldest. Der er imidlertid også et sekundært publikum. Det består af de mange mennesker, der ikke ser talen direkte, men som efterfølgende ser talen på internettet eller i medierne.
Hvorfor er denne tale interessant?
Talen er interessant, fordi Jobs italesætter nogle universelle værdier, der gør den vellykket i den umiddelbare situation, men også for et ikke tilstedeværende publikum. Talen bliver altså nærværende for både det faktiske publikum og de, der ikke er tilstede i situationen, og det er derfor interessant at se på, hvordan han formår at gøre talen nærværende for så stort et publikum.
Jobs har en væsentlig udfordring i situationen, idet han ikke selv fuldførte sin universitetsuddannelse. Hvordan skal man skabe identifikation med et publikum, der lige har taget en lang og krævende uddannelse, når man selv droppede ud og alligevel fik succes?
Talen har i forbindelse med Steve Jobs' død i oktober 2011 fået nyt liv. Den blev lige efter hans død delt og vist på internettet mere end nogensinde før. Pludselig blev talen til en mindetale for ham selv og ikke kun en dimissionstale. Læs eventuelt mere i Rasmus Rønlevs artikel "Da Steve holdt mindetale over Jobs", Retorik Magasinet, 2012.
Denne analyse fokuserer en del på Jobs' opbygning af etos, og det er derfor nyttigt at indlede med en ultrakort introduktion til Aristoteles' etos-begreb (Aristoteles er ophavsmand til begreberne etos, patos og logos.)
I følge Aristoteles etablerer man etos gennem tre dyder:
- Phronesis - at taleren er kompetent/besidder klogskab
- Aréte - at taleren er et godt moralsk menneske
- Eunoia - at taleren viser velvilje over for sit publikum.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But 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. 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.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
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 sans 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. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. 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 backward 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And 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. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Thank you all very much.
Det siger retorikerne:
På baggrund af de nedslag, vi har foretaget i analysen, kan vi begynde at forstå, hvordan Jobs’ tale kunne blive så populær - både i den oprindelige kontekst og efter hans død - selvom han så at sige startet med en etos i modvind i kraft af sin egen manglende universitetsuddannelse. (Vil man dykke mere ned i dette forhold kan begrebet constraint fra Lloyd F. Bitzers teori om den retoriske situation være nyttigt.)
Ydmygheden og velviljen er meget central, idet han viser, at han vil sit publikum det bedste, og at han ikke er kommet for at belære dem om noget (selvom det i sidste ende er det, han gør). Her igennem vinder han troværdighed.
Denne troværdighed underbygges af hans livserfaring og gode moral, og i kombinationen med patosappellen opbygger Jobs en stærk etos. Han taler til publikums følelser, hvormed han vinder sympati, samtidig med at han etableres som en klog, erfaren mand, man skal have respekt for. Det gør han endda uden, at han eksplicit behøver hæve sig over sit publikum.
Samtidig bruger han situationen til at række ud efter et bredere publikum end blot dimittenderne. Ved at brede sine konkrete historier ud og lade dem blive eksempler på nogle mere universelle, menneskelige værdier skaber han et værdifællesskab, hvor der er mulighed for identifikation, uanset om man har taget en universitetsuddannelse eller ej.
Når man læser talen, er den meget overbevisende og effektfuld. Man bliver revet med af hans personlige fortællinger og budskabet om at finde det i livet, der gør en glad. Denne effekt skaber talen, fordi den fremstår nærværende, eftersom beskrivelserne og eksemplerne i talen er så detaljerede og personlige. I teksten er patos-appellerne derfor velfungerende. Desuden fremstiller han sig i teksten som en, der ikke er bange for at følge sine drømme, som en person med livserfaring og som en person med en tilpas mængde ydmyghed - når man tænker på hans store succes.
I teksten fremstår hans etos altså meget stærkt, men i den mundtlige fremførelse oplever man en helt anden personfremstilling. Der er nemlig en stor kontrast mellem nærværet i teksten og Jobs’ mere distancerede og knapt så indlevede fremførelse af talen. Når han fx taler om at skulle forberede sig på at dø efter at have fået konstateret kræft, er hans tempo meget højt, han taler lavt, han kigger meget ned i talepapiret og den dybe indlevelse, som ordene i teksten ellers lægger op til, fremkommer ikke rigtigt i den mundtlige levering. Ordene er stærke, men hans fremførelse understøtter dem ikke tilstrækkeligt. I kraft af ordene og historierne om sit liv fremstår han i teksten som en mand med gåpåmod, men denne etos-fremstilling understøttes ikke af den mindre energiske actio, der signalerer distance og manglende indlevelse. Etos-fremstillingen i selve teksten står derfor i kontrast til den etos, han skaber i sin levering af talen.
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