I was sad to hear of Steve Jobs death. Truth be told, I'm not a card-carrying member of the Apple fan club. I still walk around with a Blackberry and use PCs. For all of Apple's innovation and simplification of technology I have never considered their products to be the holy grail that many avid followers do. They're great, but not the end-all be-all.
What I love the most about Steve Jobs' impact on the world goes far beyond Apple. He triggered a paradigm shift in how companies create and revise their products. He advocated tirelessly for a precious understanding: that technology should enhance our lives and not complicate them - that design should give us what we need and nothing more.
I went back to a text version of a speech given at Stanford University a few years ago in which Steve Jobs addressed the touchy subject of death. I believe that his own words give a great deal of meaning, and perhaps poignancy, to his own passing:
"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away."
Though provoking, huh?
I don't care to use this post to recap Jobs' career, his health problems, or his flaws. Plenty of other journalists, bloggers and pundits will do that.
Two things really jumped to mind that I personally learned from watching Steve Jobs' meteoric passage through life.
1. His personal trajectory included failure and gave me permission to make mistakes.
2. He proved that being yourself was always the best solution.
To illustrate lesson one, Job's had this to say about his painful and abrupt termination from the company he founded:
“I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,”
I'm also grateful that it gave him a window in which to turn Pixar into a Hollywood powerhouse that changed forever the face of animation. Wouldn't the world be a bit poorer without Woody, Buzz, Nemo, and many more iconic characters?
Who was Steve Jobs? A visionary? A brilliant inventor? A perfectionist? Also a college dropout, a failed executive and a risk-taker. Like all of us, his life can't be elegantly encapsulated in talking points.
Thank you Steve Jobs for packing a powerful punch in a single button, revolutionizing the technology industry. Thank you for sticking to your guns when it came to your dreams and passions. Thank you for proving that although we are all flawed, we are perfect in our own way and should be true to ourselves.
"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle...
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 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."
Beautiful.
