I
recently returned from a trip to New York City.
My kids were on spring break, so we decided to go on some college
tours. My oldest son, Jaxson, is a
junior in high school and it’s time for him to start exploring his higher
education options. We’ve toured four
schools so far and his favorite is New York University. While we were there, I learned the story of
one of their former students named Jack.
Although Jack ultimately decided not to finish college, we can still
learn from his story…
Jack
was something of an unusual kid. Instead
of posters of athletes, bands, or comic book characters, the walls of his room
were covered with maps. He was shy,
suffered from a speech impediment, and was not always comfortable interacting
in person. He was also often alone at
home. As a result, he’d learned his way
around his first computer by the age of eight, and before he was a teenager had
taught himself how to write his own programs.
He was also fascinated by trains, and would spend hours down at the St.
Louis train yards watching the flow of trains coming and going. He was entranced by the way it all seemed to
operate as one huge, perfectly functioning system.
Studying
trains was the beginning of Jack’s lifelong interest in understanding how
things work. When he was a teenager, he
began using a radio that scanned police and emergency frequencies. Listening to the dispatchers, he became
engrossed in their concise language as they constantly transmitted the
locations and activities of officers and emergency vehicles. It also gave him ideas.
After
writing his own software to track the movements and locations of emergency
vehicles, Jack felt he was ready to work in that field. Still in his teens, he sought out a large dispatch
company in New York. He looked up their
website, but it had no contact information.
However, he also found a hole in the site’s security. Using this as a way in, he was able to
contact the company and alert them to the security risk. He also mentioned that he was a computer
programmer who wrote dispatch software.
A week later, they offered him a job.
Jack
attended New York University while working as a dispatch programmer. During his time there, he was part of a
brainstorming session about the implications of instant messaging. Jack made a gutsy decision to leave college
and pursue dispatch work in California.
Soon after, he started his own company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and
emergency services from the Web. But it
wasn’t long before the dots began to connect.
Thinking
back to his youth and remembering how the voices on the police scanner would
constantly update their positions from wherever they were, Jack came up with a
new idea. He approached a company who
was exploring instant messaging and described a new form of virtual
communication that would be as immediate as texting, but among a much larger
number of people at once. The idea was
to take the short bursts of communication of the dispatch world and create a
web-based network that anyone with a cell phone, wherever they were, could use
to send messages.
The
story of how Jack found success with his idea is a great example of how things
are connected. And there’s no denying
that by following his passions, a young man who was never comfortable in
simple, face-to-face conversations was able to create Twitter, one of the
largest communication networks the world has ever seen. By 2012, Twitter had over 500 million
registered users, generating over 340 million messages, called "tweets,"
per day. Since its launch, Twitter has
become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet, and its founder,
Jack Dorsey, was named 2012's Innovator of The Year.
One
reporter recently referred to Jack as an idea man, and I found Jack’s response
very interesting: “Everyone has an idea.
But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to
help you work on the idea that really makes the difference.” The We Are Connected mindset is about seeking
out the synergies in all relationships and empowering one another to live your
dreams.
