Leaving a legacy.

Pretty much everyone is going to be talking today about yesterday's passing of Steve Jobs.  And here I am to jump on that bandwagon. I'm not a computer programmer, I know how to do the simplest of all things computer related and on my iphone. But, nonetheless, I think it goes to say that somehow, someway, I am still affected by Steve Jobs influence.

In college, I was in one of my core business classes (I cannot for the life of me remember which one- senior seminar? Maybe?) and I had to do a report (or what FELT like a dissertation at the time) on an instrumental person in the business world who had overcome adversity and succeeded. I selected Steve Jobs (I bet I still have that report somewhere... it would be interesting to find it right now!) Anyhow, from that report, I learned so much about him including how he brought Apple back in the late 90s after being fired from Apple in the 80s. I learned about his personal life. I learned about how he operated as a businessman. I learned how he viewed success. All of this was circa about 2003, well before the release of the iphone, ipad, or hell, maybe even before the ipod. At that time, he was still successful with many, many great things to come. I don't know that any one person can ever fully be solely responsible for a company's success but I DO believe that these individuals who are credited with it are responsible in that they understand what it takes to run a successful business- from product to the people surrounding them. I do believe that Steve Jobs had it right and that his loss will be felt deeply- and for a long time- from people like me who just use and love their Apple products to higher techy people who work with these products every hour of every day, using them to their full capability. 

To end- a few quotes floating around out there today (of course) that Steve Jobs was credited with during a commencement speech at Standford in 2005, right around the time he was initially diagnosed with cancer. Pretty good words of wisdom:

"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...."

"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.....Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."