One more thing
When I was in the third grade, I wrote a letter to Bill Clinton. You're probably wondering what business an eight-year-old has with the President of the United States. It was a short letter. Short and sweet. I told him I thought he was a good president. And you know what? He responded to me. Receiving a personal letter from the White House was one of the happiest days of my youth.
Not to be dramatic, but I had been meaning to send an email to Steve. I just hadn't decided what to write. I knew I couldn't write just anything. I mean, I'm not eight anymore. And most importantly, I was nervous about getting a response like, "Just avoid holding it in that way" (forget for a second that I actually don't own an iPhone 4 to hold incorrectly). After all, it was the Steve Jobs.
For me, Steve's death has been an unwelcome and chilling reminder of our transient existence in this world. That even the most inspirational visionary, is, at the end of the day, as human as you and I. That cancer sucks. It's scary and sad. Michael Arrington said it best in this tweet: "Damn. People like Steve Jobs are supposed to live forever."
In his short time on this planet, Steve made a ding in the universe. I don't even need to explain how or why or when. Because you already know. That's how massive and meaningful that ding was. The mark he made obviously can't be credited to a formal education. But if you ask me, it also can't be credited to some innate genius or luck. Instead, it was Steve's ruthless adherence to what he believed to be true. He didn't give a shit what others thought about him. And in turn, we thought the world of him.
I've recently found myself more frequently torn between my passions and the formula. The template that most people are working off of. More concerned about what others think is right for me rather than what I think is right for me. It's not that I've strayed from my passions; it's just that I've started taking into account how my blatant disregard for the standard next step might be perceived. I can just imagine how Steve might have responded to that: "You're doing it wrong." Though, he did provide a more eloquent response in that over-quoted Stanford Commencement Address. "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 already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
As a psychology major turned Valley girl (as in, girl in tech), my admiration for Steve is most strongly rooted in the value he put on liberal arts. He's someone who just really got it. Got that sure, you can build a computer. But unless it's going to be used by a robot, it better as hell have some personality. It better as hell speak to human emotion. When you are sometimes asked twice or thrice in one day, Psychology? So what are you doing here? you more deeply appreciate a person like Steve. A person who realized that "technology alone is not enough -- it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing."
At the moment Steve Jobs passed away, I was deeply entrenched in one of the most inspiring conversations I've had in a while. It was with someone I would peg as a thought leader. I told him a bit about my passion for writing. I told him how I believe that truly understanding other people -- their motivations, their thoughts, their actions -- is one of the most challenging tasks one could ever take on. And the most thrilling. At some point, he looked at me and got very serious. There are a lot of amazing people in the Silicon Valley. They're smart as hell. And you know what makes them amazing? They followed their passions. Nobody ever becomes the best at something they're not passionate about. Just a few miles down the road from where these words were being exchanged, Steve Jobs was taking his last breaths.
I never got to write that letter. But the legend he has left behind, the inspiration, the unparalleled genius, the zest for living life before you're dead, is more than anything I could have received in an email response, no matter whether it was written in serif or sans serif font.
One more quote: "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me," he claimed. "Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful—that’s what matters to me."
Well, you did something wonderful, Steve.
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