All things must pass.
Decades from now, many of us will share our stories of where we were and what we were doing when we learned Steve Jobs passed away.
Here’s mine.
An hour ago I was wrapping up dinner with my wife and 19-month old son. One of the last nice nights before the winds shift in Chicago, we ate outside at one of our favorite restaurants near home. My iPhone per usual joined us for dinner, entertaining our son with nursery rhyme videos served up by the YouTube native app.
By nurture more than nature, I check my other smartphone every few minutes for emails and updates. And there I learned the sad but not unexpected news that Jobs passed away. Without trying to draw a scene I mumbled (more audibly than I realized) the news to my wife. Within seconds other diners near us were checking their iPhones and other devices to see if what they heard was really true.
One person at the table next to us remarked that the “Steve Jobs” entry on Wikipedia was already updated with news of his passing. Other casual diners – who I assume were not tech journalists like me – were tapping away on their phones reading every story about a man who was, by every measure, a hero.
A visionary without peer
Steve Jobs was blessed with the best attributes of Thomas Edison, John Lennon and Henry Ford. If true intelligence is defined by the ability to handle two competing thoughts at once, true genius is being able to imagine markets that never existed and create products that would then define them for years, decades and generations.
From Macs, to iPods, to iPhones, to iPads (and don’t forget about Pixar and Apple TV) Jobs and the teams he put together illustrated that progress is the synthesis of artistic and technological determination.
We will soon really understand what it is like to live in a world that Steve Jobs does not occupy.
Even yesterday, until the closing moments of the iPhone 4S announcement, many of us were holding a glimmer of hope that Jobs would walk onto the stage and pronounce his famous “one more thing.”
The gifts he gave humanity are the tools and encouragement to discover for ourselves what those things really are.
Thank you.
