October 6, 2011
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In the spring of 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford University. It had been a year since he had first been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. (At the time he had been successfully treated, and the cancer had not yet returned.) But what he revealed that day about death showed just how much the inevitability of it affected what he did with his life.
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.
….
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. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
The tragedy, of course, is that Steve Jobs was cleared away before he was old. He had more to give. And now all we can do is wait for the new. Or better still: make it ourselves.
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I didn’t have the chance to live at the same time as Thomas Edison, Graham Bell or Henry Ford. I had the chance the live at the same time as Steve Jobs.
Light an iCandle in memory of Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs is a marvelous emergence!
Link to thisMr. Jobs has been compared to Edison and Disney and Ford and Iacocca. All of this is so very wrong. Jobs ought to be compared to great artists and musicians who invented and did not just make things…We use computers in a way that no one predicted and we love them both as an interface to the world outside ourselves but also as a kind of comfortable esthetic room where we engage others and our ideas also. This was not the case with any other computer or tablet or phone until Mr. Jobs INVENTED and CREATED this conception and got his teams to work on it. For those such as I who had what was once called an IBM compatible, first trying a wonderful old Mac was just an incredible revelation and a rush of pleasure at its discovery. Today everyone expects the ease of use that a Mac and copiers deliver to a greater or lesser extent but for an old guy such as I the pleasure from accomplishing each day what I wish using his inventions gives me more than can be expressed. It is absolutely true when people say that Steve Jobs changed their lives. It has changed nearly everyone’s life even if they do not know the origins of their new world. Steve Jobs is much more than the inventor of a lightbulb or a K car ( ugh) or a cartoon character. No..Steve Jobs invented our world today…that is far more significant and the significance will be felt for the next twenty years and beyond. Revolutions are being fought for freedoms that were brought to the world directly because accessibility to the internet through simple human engineering which took away the need to invest in learning code or programming to be competent with a computer alllowed the development of an audience for its use and that is absolutely the power of Apple, Mr. Jobs baby and later his inspired and inspiring child grown up to the largest corporation on Planet Earth. There are those that call him a saleman. They do not understand yet what he did…much more than selling gadgets..He sold us for free..the world open to each of us. I will miss him greatly but his legacy is with each of us today and tomorrow also. I will now shut off Edison’s lightbulb. It was a good idea also but it never made me dream.
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