A tribute to Steve Jobs

I knew very little of Steve Jobs. What I'd heard mostly was anecdotal. His temper and expletives at management meetings. He was a no nonsense type of person and put off a lot of his senior staff. Most of this is culled from heresy, not fact.

But now that he's gone, I've learned of a different side of the man. A person who was very bright, almost a genius. A man who battled with death and beat it many times before it finally overcame him. Someone who defied all odds in life, in business and in his influence on popular culture.

I didn't know any of this till he was gone. So many questions still remain, but I now realise that the man, and I, shared a philosophy of life that he lived, and I dream about.

In a seminal commencement speech given to the 2005 graduating class of Stanford University, I learned that he was adopted. His birth parents, too young to take care of him, gave him away at birth. The couple that raised him, who he called his parents, didn't go to college. He himself dropped out after six months, but popped into the more interesting classes.

I learned that he had a love for calligraphy, something that I too love. I love handwriting, I love ink, I love fountain pens and nice paper. I love beautiful script. In that speech, he mentions that this inspired him when it came to designing typefaces for the Mac.

I learned that he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and given a few months to live and fought to continue loving and living. He lived for seven more years after that diagnosis, seven years some might argue that were his most creative. In those final years, he solidified the Mac platform and put entertainment and information devices in the hands of millions. Apple Inc. a company that was on the brink of demise at the turn of the century became the second largest company in the United States, second to Enron.

The man was remarkably smart. I have compiled some of his thoughts from that seminal speech. These are Steve Job's own words, his ideas on how to live, how to love and how to structure purpose in your life.

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.

So absolutely true. Some people say that they have no choice and that life chooses for them what they can and cannot do. They go to jobs that they don't like to work with people they despise. Instead, if you love what you're doing, then it isn't work.

"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." [......], I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

This is amazingly powerful stuff. Real and understood, yet we don't live as though today was the last day of our lives. That sense of urgency, to live, to be fulfilled, to reach out and surpass. Instead, we live as though we will get to the things that we want to do tomorrow. It's as if those things that we want to get done, aren't really all that important. They can wait. In fact, they can wait indefinitely.

When Steve Jobs said this it came from the heart. This was a man who a year earlier had been diagnosed with cancer and given only a few months to live. Imagine your doctor telling you to go home and take care of your affairs. Wouldn't you run into the nearest bar and have a few drinks? Wouldn't you want to first saturate your mind with alcohol, numb the pain? What kind of passion for the thing you love must you have to tell yourself that you must continue on because there's so much to do?

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. 

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.

That says it all. Time is short, don't waste it not doing what you'd rather do. The photograph on the left shows Steve Jobs holding a MacBook Air. The same laptop that I have, the one in which I'm writing this blog entry. It's a wonderful piece of technology.

And so what are the lessons learned? In Steve Job's own words: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish!