Last year I read this fascinating book on Steve Jobs. It was a par excellence book written by Walter Isaacson (former managing editor of Time Magazine) and it encompassed many interviews of people from his past and present. Steve Jobs passed away almost 3 years ago and his legacy in his products still live on to this day.
It detailed though the many interviews with his parents, his student day friends,, his ex-girlfriends, wife, ex-partners, friends, casual acquaintances, subordinates, board members past and present and business associates. It showed a brilliant, visionary ruthless, sometimes naive man who was fixated in building the best of the best personal computer in the world - and he succeeded. Halfway reading it, I wondered, why people are fascinated with a person with so many character 'flaws' and did the meanest things ? Yet he was idolised, hero-worshipped from afar.
Our Family
It dawned upon me, that Steve Jobs added value to the world. In terms of producing the best designed, user-friendly PCs, handphones (practically three quarters of this planet own an IPhone or aspire to own one), notebooks, entertainment stations IPods which were
'game changers ' - products which changed the way people communicated, or interacted.
He was not the best father to his first child, a daughter, even threatening his ex-girlfriend with a lawsuit on the paternity results, he ignored his daughter for more than 10 years, he bullied his 'working class' parents to pay for expensive tuition fees at Reed College, a private college, when he had won a scholarship to study at Stanford University, because it was where he could smoke weed, cut class and basically bum around in school. He bullied his partner Steve Wosniak on many things, on how the company should be run, the designs he imposed on them, the many petulant outbursts with his staff and business associates, the list of immoderate behaviour would run into the hundreds.
If he weren't the genius entrepreneur who told the world what to buy when, he would have been labelled a misfit, an asshole who meant nothing or added nothing to this world.
Yet there are numerous books about him, and his cool company, Apple. Why ? Because and only because, Apple changed the way the world looked and used the PC from the 70s to the 90s to the 2000s. It changed people's mindsets about how to interact with other people, namely using the phone as an entertainment device first with the call function second. His vision added tremendous value to everyday lives and his products were so good that even the parts which you don't see are sourced from the best suppliers and have been worked at. rewired and reworked more than a thousand times. Such is the emphasis to perfection which was the philosophy of Steve Jobs.
My niece, Hannah
In a small way, we all must add value to our relationships, our businesses, our workplace, our families and possibly to society at large giving of our time, our know-how, compassion, money and leadership which will truly be the measure of how we will look back at our lives and say :
" Yes, I did make a difference !"
Seize the Day my friends.
All the Cousins at Christmas Party 2013
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