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 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've 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 far more 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 san-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.