Steve Jobs Should Inspire Your Pole Dance

What can a college drop out teach you about success--or about pole dance, for that matter? I wonder if you knew Steve Jobs dropped out of college and lived on his friends' dorm room floors. That he aimlessly took classes, "dropped in" on classes, based on whether or not he found them interesting. He did, in fact. And there is a powerful message in that for us as dancers as we go into a new year.

In his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address Steve Jobs said,

You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that somehow the dots will connect in your future. (…) Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path; and that will make all the difference.

Why do you dance?

Our families wonder, our friends sometimes judge... sometimes even we worry about how much time we put into it. When most people would be fussing over just about anything else we are preoccupied with pointing our toes, mastering dream moves, and having the right flow. It seems out of place, sometimes. We are dancer-meteorologist-hockey-players and dancer-illustrator-graphic-designers; who could make sense of that? Yet it does make sense at some point. At some point, we carve our bit of marble into something unique. The dots connect and in retrospect? There could not have been anything more perfect.

"You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

This one is rather ironic for pole dancers, considering the misguided connotations of our art. I have been reflecting on why I am so in love with pole dance: a hidden love of controversy, inherent rebelliousness, or maybe just a love for the community? Maybe all of these. Maybe just the fact that pole dance is everything beautiful in figure skating without a rink, the perfect fusion of ballet and daring, and so many elements that refuse to fit a mold. It is... right. All I need to do is look to any one pole dancer to see the magic that draws me to pole. I follow that love that lives in my brain, nothing else could possibly be as right.

Voracious.

I'll admit one thing today: I admit I am voracious. One day in high school we were gathered for an IB Honors discussion--quite the big deal for those of us that put ourselves through a few [beyond] college level subjects. Each of us was to say one word, "describe yourself in one word." Someone stole mine right away, of course, "inquisitive." A student I admired said "driven." Ohh. You can bet we were a thesaurus of words that felt like it ran dry when it got to me. I... said "timid." It was not even really true at that point. I was someone living through abuse by my mother but I was more than that. I read piles of novels at night, played with CSS just to understand it, studied French because I already knew Spanish, parented my siblings, and I drank in Classical music.

I was, and am, voracious. I have been continually hit hard in my life but I eat miles and sing weights and breathe dancing because I am hungry for life and the beauty of it. My New Year's resolution is to stay true to this and not be that person who ran out of shiny words to be. To be hungry for life--this is what I make of Steve Jobs final message and it's what I also hope for you. I hope that your dance in 2014 is the expression of your hunger for life and that you abandon all silly logic of what labels you wear or what you should or should not do and just... do. Just...

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Steve Jobs Speaks At WWDC07 by Ben Stanfield, CC Attribution 2.0 License