I was neither a Steve Jobs devotee nor an Apple junkie.
I didn't follow him or his career. I never owned Apple Stock. I did follow the company for a brief period in 2006-2007 when I worked for Highmount Capital, and watched the stock slosh around in the $60 - $80 price range. But I didn't bite. I wished that I had. (The share price reached a high of $412 last month!)
Until fairly recently, I never even owned an Apple product. I was, for most of my career as a lawyer, an IBM “PC guy”, not a “Mac guy.” It was only in February, 2007, upon the recommendation, nay, insistence, of another tech guru and visionary, my then partner George Gilder, that I bit into the forbidden fruit and bought my first Apple product: a black-cased MacBook laptop from the Apple Store in the Burlington Mall.
I never looked back. It turned out to be, from the perspective of performance and design, simply the best computer I have ever owned. I am writing this post on it now. I may never buy another computer. It represents, in its sleek look, tight tolerances, and flawless performance, exactly what Jobs sought to capture: perfection of the synthesis of technology and art.
But Steve Jobs’ genius was not confined merely to the technical. And while I resist the sort of trendiness that attached to him in his final years, his life is worth paying attention to. It was not without suffering and disappointment, from which he distilled wisdom and a great perspective.
As we all know by now, his biological mother conceived him out of wedlock, but courageously went on bear her child. No “termination of pregnancy” for this victim-mother. How many other geniuses like Jobs never had a chance because their moms were tragically propagandized by those trumpeting “choice” over being? Sadly, we’ll never know.
Given up for adoption by his biological mom and raised by the Jobs Family, he would marry and father four children of his own. Unmistakably bright from the start, he dropped out of college. His vision of success and happiness was not confined to that narrow boulevard that passes through $50,000 per year tuitions at overrated Universities populated by overpaid and under-worked faculty.
He started Apple in his parents’ garage. After developing the Macintosh computer and watching Apple grow to a billion dollar a year company, he saw his "board crash” as it were: he was actually fired by the Apple Board of Directors at the age of 30. Down, but not out, he went off and started Pixar. Twelve years later, a struggling Apple begged him to come back. He did and it was off to the races.
Most people would consider a life well lived if they could say at the end of the day that they had been involved in the development of only one life changing product. Jobs, by my count, inspired and lead the development of at least five: (i) the Macintosh Computer, (ii) Pixar Studios (which he started and later sold to Disney for $7.1 billion after his exile from Apple), (iii) the iPhone, (iv) iTunes, and (v) the iPad. This extraordinary string of accomplishments put him right up there with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison in the Pantheon of American technological geniuses.
And his grasp of people and metaphysics was as refined as his grasp of technology and its possibilities. You have all, by now, listened to the speech he deliver at the Stanford Commencement in 2001: http://www.youtube.com/
You may also enjoy the selection of quotes compiled by our friends at the Wall Street Journal: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/24/steve-jobss-best-quotes/
And he did it all without government money.
You may also enjoy the selection of quotes compiled by our friends at the Wall Street Journal: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/08/24/steve-jobss-best-quotes/
And he did it all without government money.
His commencement speech is marked in that it is not an example of the typical Silicon Valley managerial string of platitudes we are accustomed to hearing. There is an existentialist theme throughout; he clearly lived each moment in the reality of impending death. His quotes such as, “even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there," may sound a bit condescending to Christians, but death for Christians, is the last enemy to be destroyed (1Cor 15:26). His acceptance of death as “how it should be” and as “the single best invention of life” is, however, at best the confusion of a contemporary virtuous pagan – a courageous existentialist facing the inevitable. We can only hope that prior to his last breath, he discovered that most important exception to his observation about death, “no one has ever escaped it,” the exception by which our calendar is set and through which we gain that peace which transcends all understanding. +Pax Christi+
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