Somewhere at the end of the 1970s I was sitting with a few friends at the edge of the nude beach at Lucy Vincent discussing the future. Our futures. The youngest was a pretty woman fresh from her student days at Oberlin College, vacationing with her parents who had a home in Chilmark. She piped up with what I could only see as a pipe dream.

“I’m going off to Bali and Indonesia to learn all about the craft of puppet-making.” Sure. And what would you ever do with that expertise? A nice hobby maybe, but I thought we were talking about ways to build a career, to make a living. I thought her response was drenched in that wetness found behind the ears. But little did I know that she would leave me in the dust of that cliché.

That dreamer was Julie Taymor, who would go on to win acclaim with her spectacular puppets, directing for stage The Lion King, Juan Darien and King Stag. And those were just at the start of her theatrical career.

Years later I asked myself, why do we sometimes question someone’s leap of faith as a swan dive into oblivion, someone’s secret passion as a one-way ticket to Palookaville? Why do we act as if the artistic path is a less serious journey? Why do we let our inner John Calvin trump the little Calvin and Hobbes lurking elsewhere inside us? These are good questions to bring up again, now that it’s graduation time. Time to commence, but to what end?

We live in a different time than the one Julie and I grew up in. A college education today is financially astronomical. But as essayist Malcolm Gladwell has said, many an underpriced college is as good as an overpriced one. The point is to get an education and the experience — a chance to learn what living together is all about, a chance to sample and taste what’s on that smorgasbord of college courses, a chance to dream — without closing the doors of imagination with too much debt.

The late Steve Jobs was quite forthright about how his college dreams and experimentation paid off. Ten years ago, in a now famous commencement speech at Stanford, he explained how “following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.” He fell in love with a calligraphy course that introduced him to the fascinating world of typography. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

The calligrapher in him saw his choices as a connecting of dots. He learned to trust the dots. Looking back on them, he saw the pattern in his life. His message was simple — find what you love and stick with it. Believe in yourself. Don’t lose faith. Don’t settle for something that does not feel like love.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Mr. Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ 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.”

I feel privileged to have gone to college 50 years ago. Things did not cost nearly as much as they do today. My four years of tuition, room and board at Brandeis was $10,000. Total. I had the opportunity and freedom to dream upon graduating. I could experiment, dabble, think pie in the sky. I could take the time to see what I was all about, to connect the dots. Mr. Jobs noted in his speech that the final issue of The Whole Earth Catalogue showed a photo of an early morning country road leading somewhere. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Many of today’s graduates will feel they have to forsake creativity because of financial fears, which can be understandable. They may feel they don’t have the time to practice “foolishness” because they have to get themselves or their parents out of debt and pay back those college loans.

But if we want to live in a healthy and productive culture, we cannot afford to continue without dreaming, without creating — and who knows where those creations will lead. We cannot go on as a society without using our imaginations, and allowing for our inner Julie Taymors to flourish.

Or another way to put it, sometimes it’s important to think Jobs before you think jobs.

Arnie Reisman and his wife, Paula Lyons, regularly appear on the weekly NPR comedy quiz show, Says You! He also writes for the Huffington Post.