"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"

I didn't decide overnight to back off the teaching gig. After sharing my concerns with the instructor who hired me, we redefined the role a bit and I decided to let it cruise in a probationary state before I made a final decision, remaining for the rest of the semester in any case. But then, within days of each other, two things happened that all but made my decision for me.

First, the excellent podcast Freakonomics Radio published the episode "The Upside of Quitting", about the solid but often obscure benefits of bailing as quickly as possible from a job (or career, or lifestyle) once it starts to fit badly. I remember exactly where I was walking once I heard the episode's topic, over my headphones; it meshed uncannily with my teaching situation, and gave me something to think about.

I was still thinking when Steve Jobs died. And all across my RSS feeds and my little corner of Twitter, countless very smart people eulogized him not merely by reflecting on his technological legacy, but by linking to his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, and quoting in particular this excerpt:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary.

(Full transcript of the address here.)

My outlook on life might be slightly less adversarial than Steve's was; I don't really see people actively trying to yoke me to their own dogmas, per se. But I do know of my own proclivity to enter into agreements and responsibilities that carry me away from what my heart knows is my right path, just because they're something new or — much worse — something less scary than what I ought to be doing. The quote resonated so deeply with me and my situation that its contemplation, with its great psychic weight from Jobs' own transformative death, brought me to tears.

That one photograph of Jobs — you know the one I'm talking about — is going to gel over the years into a real icon, and it won't represent Apple or iPads or whatnot so much as the attitude and philosophy that drove him, the most positive aspects of which he expressed in that address. Over time, you will see the photograph about as often as you'll see the photographs you think of when I say "Marilyn" or "Che", and it will carry the same level or power, the same amount of compressed symbolic payload.

The day of his passing, I pinned a printout of that photograph to the corkboard over my desk, and I expect it will stay there for a long time; perhaps one day I'll wish to replace it with something a little more permanent, more fitting for an object of meditation. I find the image's gaze and pose an irresistible invitation to consider what I'm doing, and weigh whether I'm really spending my limited time as well as I could be. And when the answer is "No", to find the courage to take the next step.

And, yes, it's happened once already.