T he World has lost one of it’s true visionaries, and in light of this historical day, I wanted to share some of the quotes from Steve Jobs that have impacted me.
“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
– BusinessWeek interview, May 1998
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. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list….That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of lomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away.
That’s what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”– Interview for the documentary “Memory and Imagination,” 1990
Thank you, Steve. Your attention to details, your ability to harness technology and weave it into the tapestry of the human experience, and your vision to propel us into the 21st Century has forever changed the landscape of our lives. My grandkids will read about you in history books, and I will talk of a bygone era when I sat in the freezing cold of night, camping out to get my hands on one of your works of art.
