Steve Jobs

Building a Legacy

Steve is renowned worldwide, a legend of all time for his tremendous ability to build what people wanted—whether they knew it at the time or not. He's renowned for his ability to almost see into the future, to build things that transcend time and space and meet an aesthetic need that everyone has without really knowing it. Some of his positions held in business include:

• Co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc.
• Primary investor and chairman of Pixar
• Founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT
• Board member of The Walt Disney Company¹

This is a memorial to Steven Paul, both the man we knew and the man we didn't know from some of my personal favorite sources about him.

Walter Isaacson's Analysis

Walter Isaacson was privileged to write, among the biographies of other geniuses, the biography of the late Steve Jobs. And while Mr. Isaacson certainly did not shy away from recognizing the brilliance in front of him, saying, "So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius ... His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor."

Isaacson goes on to explain that Jobs's brilliance lay in his unique balance of seemingly oxymoronic skill sets: "The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one's ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing."²

In fact, even the cover photo for Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs is noteworthy and historical. Photographer Albert Watson said of the cover photo (which is also the photo at the top of this page), "If you look at that shot, you can see the intensity. It was my intention that by looking at him, that you knew this guy was smart." ³

Roll the Tape

One of Steve's most famous speeches he ever gave, a commencement address at Stanford

Casey Neistat, a famous vlogger and social media influencer with a tribute given after Steve's passing:

Steve's Own Quotes

• "I want some kid at Stanford to be able to cure cancer in his dorm room." ⁴

• "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

• "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."

• "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

• "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

• "Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them."

• "For the past 33 years, 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?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

• "I want to put a ding in the universe."

• "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."

• "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back."

• "We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build."

• "I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed."

All quotes besides the first can be found here.

A Simple Thank You

One more example, and a brief acknowledgement that Mr. Jobs was far from perfect. As one New York Times profile noted, "He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager. He had an astonishing aesthetic sense, which businesspeople almost always lack. He could be absolutely brutal in meetings: I watched him eviscerate staff members for their 'bozo ideas.'" The article goes on to explain that Steve was "arrogant, sarcastic, thoughtful, learned, paranoid and 'insanely' (to use one of his favorite words) charismatic."⁵

Easy is not a word that can be used to describe Steve's life. Adopted as a child, Steve grew up knowing his real parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali (a Muslim from Syria). Steve dropped out of Reed College quickly and started Apple from a literal garage. Still, he stands as one of the figures who has perhaps done the most to contribute to the way our world looks today. I'm even writing this on a MacBook right now.