Opinions are not as important as ideas.
Jony Ive’s speech to the students of the California College of the Arts in the pandemic.
Jony Ive and his team created the black mirrors that all of us hold up in front our faces. He redesigned Apple in his image and built the most valuable company on the planet. I have been studying his life, his work, his team, and his practice for over a decade. I learn so much from his example.
The speech below is worthy of your time. It will require you to not be distracted for just 15 minutes. You must resist the notifications, set aside your other urges, and listen.
To help you in this endeavour, I have taken the raw transcript of the speech and formatted it correctly. If you do not have the attention span to sustain any long-form reading, try skimming the bits I have highlighted in bold.
LoveFrom,
ric.eth
Thank you, President Beale for those kind and very generous words. This is an extraordinary honour for me and I am profoundly grateful to be invited to share this moment with you.
I think ceremony creates some space and helps us to mark the important moments of our lives and this is one of those special and important moments.
This is quite obviously not a traditional graduation ceremony. Everyone is watching this on a screen—including me—which is quite odd, as I’m currently watching myself. We should be together. We should be able to feel your excitement and pride. We should be able to share in your joy and your remarkable achievement. I imagine that many of you are with people who love you and who are proud of you, and that is what really matters.
This gathering of family, friends, teachers, and faculty are all here to celebrate you, the graduating class of 2021.
This was not the final year you imagined, nor deserved. But talking with some of you, I was so very impressed by your commitment and determination in the face of such challenging circumstances. Without workshops or studios, you still made work at home on kitchen tables and in bedrooms. I even talked to one artist who painted in a tent in the yard! It is unspeakably sad that this was all too often without each other, and I also sense many of you are mindful of friends who had to make the difficult decision to leave the college this year.
It is, though, a glorious thing to celebrate 500 artists designers and architects as they graduate as a generation of creatives with your own new and hopeful ideas
you are critically important. As President Beale noted, this is not the time to seek the comfortable familiarity of the past, but rather to build and make something new.
And so to all of you: my heartfelt congratulations!
I’ve always felt a particular connection with people who create who have ideas, who make. A connection that transcends age or discipline; and while we practice in many different ways as designers, painters, sculptors, writers and architects our work essentially comes from the same place.
So, with the sincere hope of being useful, I would like to share a little of my personal journey with you. And while it is personal, I hope it resonates as the journey of a fellow creative.
As a young boy, all I wanted to do was draw and make with the single-minded determination of someone who had discovered what it is they love. And I suspect because I was hopeless at everything else.
I became consumed with creating and making. I studied Industrial Design at College and started to learn about the skills particular to design. I loved my practice; and it started to help inform my sense of identity. It helped me understand how I could contribute to society and to culture. I began to think of myself as a designer rather than a shy person that couldn't read very well or speak with any confidence.
As I became more preoccupied, though, with becoming a professional designer, I started to worry about an imbalance. While developing my design practice legitimised and channeled my creativity, I started to feel that my childhood dreaming and imagination was being left behind.
College is of course exactly the place and exactly the time to focus on developing our professional skills. But what bothered me was just how easily my attention was consumed with the specific skills of design rather than the fundamentally important ones of creating.
Not to sound hopelessly dramatic, but I almost felt I was betraying the dreaming and the wandering that had really sustained me as a child. Without imagination, without profoundly new thinking and potent ideas our practice has no purpose.
There was one class that brought my tentative worries and concerns into focus. It was a class that permanently changed the way I thought about the sanctity of creating. It was a sculpture class—a plaster sculpture class—it would begin by making crude moulds in aluminium and then casting plaster. After it dried, we would sculpt and refine the plaster forms by hand using saws and rasps. But the plaster workshop was very small and it was complete carnage. The air would become opaque with white plaster dust; and large pieces of plaster covered the floor and tables.
But my teacher, Roy Morris, was absolutely brilliant. He was quiet, he was kind, and he was patient; and it was an important class because I learned about form and making form. Yet I dreaded the class—because I was allergic to plaster dust—and despite wearing my mask I would end up wheezing with streaming eyes and my tongue would swell, so that I sounded like scooby-doo when I spoke.
But here's the thing, while we learned about form and proportion, Roy was really teaching us about the fundamental value of our thinking and our ideas; and this began with teaching us how to respect our own work. You see, when Roy asked us about our sculpture, he would get fantastically agitated if we ever refer to it glibly or casually. Despite the complete chaos inside the plaster workshop, he would expect us to stop what we were doing, carefully clear a small patch on the table free of plaster debris dust and tools. We would then place our work carefully in the centre and attempt a thoughtful explanation.
Now Roy also had an allergy to plaster—and it was even worse than mine. But he endured those lessons fuelled with a fierce belief in the almost sacred importance of creating.
I came to learn from him that creating and thinking should always be afforded a rare respect.
And this is the important thing: Always a rare respect!
Not only when the ideas are good; and not only if the circumstances are easy and convenient.
If we make it our habit to respect our ideas and our process, we increase the probability that they will actually be good and worthy of that respect. I cannot thank him enough.
And so I really want to encourage you to be neither distracted nor limited by your respective areas of expertise. Of course, your disciplines and the skills you have learned are wonderfully important. But just know they will tend to naturally win the competition for your attention.
My encouragement is to be committed and proactive in caring for that deep creative part of yourself that is easily overlooked; to develop an unconditional respect for your creativity, which will sustain you during the times when the ideas are either sparse or not very good.
Our professional skills develop with repetition. Our creativity develops with deep care and intention.
I obsess trying to deeply understand the general nature of ideas. Understanding their nature, I tend to have more ideas and do a better job caring for, protecting, and developing them.
Ideas, by definition, are always fragile. If they were resolved, they wouldn't be ideas. They would be products that were ready to ship. I’ve come to learn that you have to make an extraordinary effort not to focus on the problems which are implicated with any new idea.
These problems are known, they're quantifiable, and understood. But you have to focus on the actual idea, which is partial, tentative and unproven. If you don't actively suspend your disbelief. If you don't believe there is a solution to the problems, of course you will lose faith in your idea. That is why criticism and focusing on the problems can be so damaging, particularly in the absence of a constructive idea.
Remember: Opinions are not ideas.
Opinions are not as important as ideas.
Opinions are just opinions.
Perhaps the most important thing I can share with you today is about curiosity. Being truly open, inquisitive and curious has become the very basis for all that I do and how I think. Having a genuine relish for being surprised—and for learning—is fundamental to creating many of us have a natural or innate predisposition to be curious.
Though I have learned that after a traditional education or working an environment with many people it has to be a decision. It requires intent and discipline in interactions. With larger groups, many of us gravitate towards the tangible and the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier, and more socially acceptable to talk about what is known.
Of course, being curious fuels our appetite to learn, and wanting to learn is far more important than being right.
Curiosity can unite us and form the basis for powerful and joyful collaborations. And crucially, the delight and joy of curiosity and learning can temper our fear of doing something completely new.
Lastly, one of the wonderful consequences of being open is that you find yourself actually listening.
To listen well means you need to be quiet.
Great ideas can come from the quietest voice.
And I really worry how many good ideas I have missed because I wasn't listening or I couldn't hear a thing for the usual deluge of opinion.
I think it would be great to resist the urge to fill every moment of every minute with opinions and to listen.
So to you, the class of 2021:
To the creatives that will define our futures.
To your openness and to your curiosity and to your ideas.
I wish you the very very best on your next adventures.
I trust that you embrace truly value and nurture your creativity.
And I hope that you will at last be able to know the joy of collaborating in person very soon.
Thank you so very much.
LoveFrom,
Jony Ive
