A Man

Like a good many historical figures who've come and gone on this Earth, I think Steve Jobs gets a good deal more reverence than he actually deserves from people who don't even know him. However, he's a person I've thought about a lot (not just in the last two days), and I think I'd like to distill some of those thoughts here. I hope you don't mind.

I have to admit that the sudden passing of Steve Jobs had more of an effect on me than I expected it would. While I have been what might be called an Apple Fanboy for a very long time now, I've really only owned about four Apple devices in my lifetime: my current MacBook Pro, the PowerMac G5 that Gemini bought, a 1st gen iPod Touch (2nd-hand), and an Apple //c I picked up at DI a few years back so I could remember the good ol' days. I've never met the guy, only seen him in video clips from the heady beginning days of the personal computer industry and at the more recent product launches. We have known for a while that he was ill, that he was going to die sooner than later, but even so, I was surprised at how sad I was to think that he'd actually gone.

Steve Jobs was an influential person. That much can not be argued. I take issue with the idea that he singlehandedly "invented" the iPad, iPod, or the iPhone. Even the original Macintosh was not purely his brainchild. However, it's easy to imagine a world without Steve as a world without any of those things. His broader influence is more difficult to measure. Many innovations have been attributed (sometimes accurately) to him: the Graphical User Interface. Good computer typography. The Personal Computer itself, as a really personal, usable thing. What would things have been like without his influence? If he hadn't built the NeXT computer, would Tim Berners-Lee have had a platform on which to invent HyperText and the World Wide Web? What would the Internet look like today if that hadn't happened when it did? Would the good guys have defeated the aliens in Independence Day if Dave didn't have a PowerBook? It is my guess that most of this stuff would have happened anyway, eventually. Progress is not one man. When people have needs, they solve them. Stuff gets done. People like Steve Jobs, though, are somehow ahead of the game. They know what we're going to need before we get there. They accelerate progress. That makes it sound like only really good marketing, which Apple certainly had nailed, but real innovation is more than convincing us we need to drink more soda and get fat. You can't argue that the stuff that came out of Apple didn't change the way we live, and not in a way that makes us fatter.

I think Steve Jobs had a different kind of influence on me though. I appreciate the ubiquity of smart phones, and the freedom normal people have to make movies at home. These are wonders of technology, but the person who was Steve Jobs was so much more than a great technological thinker, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the man's mind worked. This was a guy who got stuff done. If his interest had been transportation instead of personal computing, the kinds of vehicles we'd be using now won't be thought of for another 20 years. He seemed to transform the reality around him to fit what he thought it should be. The Reality Distortion Field actually worked in reality -- your reality. I don't think there is a name for that quality. Some have called it charisma, but I think it goes way beyond that. Maybe manic charisma or something. However you slice it, Steve Jobs was effective, in a way that I dream about being. He had a complicated personality, and I can't say that much of what he did personally I would find emulable. His ability to pull vision into reality, though, will always be inspiring.

Really influential people are all over in history. We read about them in books. They invented light bulbs. They advanced science and thought. They sat under apple trees. The things they did influenced the way we live our lives today. Usually, though, such figures of genius are just stories in books. They aren't even real. They may be written in history, their feats cataloged in textbooks, but how does that make them any more tangible than figures of Greek Mythos? Characters like this are not mere humans. Their feats are unattainable because they are made of different stuff than we are. They are immortal.

Jobs has already been compared to a number of these figures, and in some ways rightly so. What's unique about him, in my frame of reference, is that he was alive last week. I shared 27 solar revolutions with this creative genius, and am among the most immediate recipients of his passion and work. He wasn't in my textbooks growing up, he was on the news. I watched the things he did change the world radically before my eyes. I remember a time before Pixar, and have him, in part, to thank for some of the best movies I think have ever been made. It's a silly thing to say out loud, but Steve Jobs was mortal. Putting his accomplishments next to Newton and Galileo and Edison and the others reminds me that they were mortal too, and that is inspiring to me.

This is probably the question I most commonly ask myself when thinking about Apple and Jobs: what can I learn from him about being that effective? Is there an essence of "genius" in there somewhere that can be distilled and drank? The answer changes from time to time, and mostly revolves around hard work, but I'm grateful to have such historical figures to remind me that it's possible. Jobs is probably even more inspiring to me because he is so current.

It's no good to think of what might have been had he lived another 10 years, and to do so would be completely out of character with his philosophy of living. Still, it's sad to see him go so young, and a little depressing to think that he'll never again walk out on stage in his blue jeans to take forever to make a dramatic product announcement.

But, there are other geniuses out there. More people who will change the game in some way or another. More figures to be written into the history books. I imagine that somebody else will captivate our imagination and strike involuntary awe in our hearts. It won't do, though, so sit around and see who they are and what they come up with. They're not.

Steve Jobs was bold. He was inventive, influential, fearless, and effective. He was a man.

And so am I.

May he be remembered for the good he brought to the world, and in a way that inspires us to be so passionate about what we love. May his legacy for us be that we too can be among the crazy ones.