A Singularly Creative Mind
"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. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."The death of Steve Jobs has shocked the world. He was, after all, still a young man. He was also, clearly, an ingenious, industrious innovator. Unpretentious and completely absorbed in the challenges of emerging technology. Technology which his genius helped to shape. Revolutionizing the world of communications and entertainment in a way that impacted everywhere, everyone.
What inner demon motivates such people? When their focus is all-consuming and geared toward manifestly introducing new concepts and new realities to the world through technological innovation that few others could match. And those who could, could not match his fervour and the level of his dedication. He co-launched a technological empire, in Apple, now valued at $350-billion.
He does have his match, of course, in Bill Gates of Microsoft fame. Bill Gates and his wife Melissa have done, on another scale entirely, something that Steve Jobs never appears to have considered approaching; using his vast wealth to improve the world in other ways, unrelated to the advance of technology, but completely related to humanity's most elemental needs.
To each his own. Technology was his goal in life, its advancement, the capacity to go where none had imagined before him. Philanthropy clearly was not a motivating factor in what he attempted to achieve. He derived his excitement and satisfaction from forging new links and applying what he could foresee to forwarding those advances.
Unveiling, to loud exhalations of surprised applause, scintillating new technological devices to an avidly waiting world of consumers anxious not to miss out on the latest, the newest gadgetry gave him great pleasure, leading him to more of the same. He was the consummate consumer marketer.
Perhaps it was his personal history as a beloved adopted son of two lower-middle-class parents, understanding that his natural parents chose to surrender him as a newborn that shaped his vision of himself. It cannot have helped that his biological parents who had given him up for adoption when they were fellow university students later married and had another child.
The obvious love and care that his adoptive parents lavished on the young boy seems not to have satisfied something deep within him that rebelled against having been rejected initially. But his was an unorthodox mind, at a rebellious time in social history in any event.
His restlessness and avid curiosity about the world, and his fascination with technology combined, in any event, to produce a truly unique personality.
Steve Jobs
- Labelled both "soft-spoken and gracious" and arrogant
- Never met his estranged Syrian father
- Denied paternity of his daughter for years
- Dropped out of university, flirted with Buddhism
- Visited India and came back with a shaved head
- Dabbled in psychedelic drugs and primal scream therapy
- A pescetarian who only ate vegetables and fish
- Family man who idolised the Beatles and Bob Dylan
Labels: Technology, That's Life, World News
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 06, 2011
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