Uniqueness

Steve Jobs told a story about his college experience, in which he jettisoned the traditional curriculum, and replaced it with only classes which he himself found interesting. One of these classes was caligraphy. According to Jobs, his love of that class inspired him to later produce computers which provide all the good looking, artistic type styles and fonts we all know and love on computers today.

Jobs seemed to strongly believe that his spontaneous decision to follow his heart in class selection was ultimately extremely fortuitous, serendipitous for the world's computer development.

True enough, I suppose. However...

do you suppose that if Jobs hadn't had that caligraphy class, that nonetheless, eventually, somebody else would have installed caligraphic type on computers? Perhaps its even possible that everything he ever accomplished would have been accomplished by somebody else, if he hadn't done it.

Perhaps the same is true of most accomplishments of most of us.

Perhaps our value to others resides merely in our essential uniqueness as people, not in the uniqueness of anything we accomplish.

Mozart was necessary for Mozart's music to come into existence. But computer caligraphy? Who knows, maybe you or I would have eventually gotten tired of boring type styles, and done the same thing that Jobs did. Maybe somebody else would have formed a creative and successful computer company. Maybe somebody else would even have written Mozart's music...