The Power of Positive Destruction

Chapter 2 Ask WTF

After a year in Israel, I returned to the United States ready to take on college at Tufts University outside Boston. Tufts was an expected part of my trajectory. My dad, uncle, and brother all went to Tufts, and I never contemplated other options. We call it “Merrin University.” But once there, I was unsure of what I wanted to do. I majored in political science, a common default major at the time. I didn’t prove to be much of a student and didn’t earn stellar grades.

I really liked computers, introduced to me by my uncle, who was one of the earliest and largest Apple dealers. It was the early 1980s, and I was the only one that I knew in college with a personal computer. It was an Apple IIe, which I used to play Space Invaders, Defenders, and Pac-Man, and occasionally I used its word processing software for a paper. I was mostly concerned with having fun and not really thinking about how my classes could relate to my future. I was excited about one course in my schedule, though—Introduction to Computer Programming; it was offered pass/fail. I enrolled and had to drop it because I was failing. I took an elective course in stocks and bonds. There, I got a solid B. I didn’t know where I was heading; I took those courses because they looked interesting, not because I believed they were a stepping-stone to a career. Similarly, the other classes I most remember—Byzantine history, art history, and Yiddish literature—were personal intellectual interests, not potential ...