On Steve Jobs

Over the last few years I’ve perhaps been more transfixed by Apple’s products. Their design and functionality attracted me more than the competitive products, especially in 2006 when I bought my Macbook. The beautiful, white, wonderful example of industrial design was years ahead of the bulky laptops that Dell and HP were tossing onto the market. Due to the success of those white Macbooks the entire landscape of design in the PC industry has changed. Now every company produces beautiful machines. That is what Steve Jobs did more than anything else. He could see trends before they happened and he knew what the customer wanted.

The Apple of 1983 was happy building Apple IIs and if John Scully had his way they would have never moved forward from making variants to the popular computer. Steve Jobs took a team of engineers and designers, removed from the rest of the Apple campus and built the first consumer computer that featured a Graphical User Interface. Without that bold step forward it might have been years before a company decided to take a chance on a GUI, setting the development of consumer operating systems back years.

The modern introductions of iPod, iPhone, and iPad share the same pattern. Jobs didn’t invent the categories but he gave consumers what they wanted out of the products and by Apple developing the products the world of digital music, multi-touch smartphones, and multitouch tablets exploded.

Even if you’ve never used an Apple product, or would never think of using an Apple product, the technology you’re using today has been effected in some way by Steve Jobs. The world is a better place because of Steve Jobs.

An Apple without Steve Jobs and a Microsoft without Bill Gates. The personalities responsible for transforming our society have taken their leave. The next generation of innovators will build on their work and continue to change the world for the better. The march of progress continues on.

As everyone else on the internet has already discovered, the commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stamford is among his greatest legacies. In it he three stories from his life and his philosophy in approaching it. The first is connecting the dots, trusting that "the dots will connect" if you follow your heart. The second is love and loss, how he always tired to do what he loved to do and never worked for anyone but himself. The third is death, his relationship to death before and after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The speech is inspiring, to say the least, and is one of the few moments that Steve Jobs shows a personal side of himself. One of the few times he relates to an audience on a human level. It’s a shame he didn’t try to do it more often.

Here are some of the best excepts from the speech, along with link to the full speech and the video.

"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. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. 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. Everything else is secondary."

"On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." - Steve Jobs

Words to live by. Words I want to live by, at least. Makes me rethink a lot of things. Perhaps it's time to stop standing still. It's time to move forward. Not slowly, not safely. I've been trying to live safely, but no one ever made something of themselves by taking the safest road. No one exciting, at least.