There’s two events in my life where I can clearly recall what I was doing at the time. The first is 9/11. I was eight years old and I came down from my bedroom, my parents were staring at the TV in disbelief. I knew I was witnessing something important.
The second is Steve Jobs’ death. I was sitting at my college’s math center. My friend who was sitting next to me suddenly declared: “Steve Jobs is dead.” Not sure why but I cried a little bit. It felt sad, and I didn’t even know the guy.
Steve Jobs whether you hate him or love him, you can’t deny the impact he had on our world and industry. He made technology relatable. He made it Human. He redefined how humans relate to each other via the introduction of the iPhone. Smart Phones rewired how we perceive the world and ultimately our consciousness.
I remember the naysayers. It’s too expensive, he should’ve stuck to iPods. He had a knack of being unconventional. In Japan, my home country, I remember a TV show where some rich businessmen bought the iPhone but primarily used their flip phone for work. It’s a toy they said. A decade later and now almost every citizen has some kind of smart phone.
Google and Facebook built an empire on Steve’s Jobs platform and ideas. Search and social media wouldn’t have been able to scale their power so widely without the introduction of the iPhone. He left a seed and technologists grew an Amazon.
Personally I listen to his Stanford graduation speech occasionally. Whenever I feel lost in life I remember, “stay hungry, stay foolish.” Those four words takes loads off my shoulders. I could only connect the dots looking back. I don’t have all the answers and that’s okay.
Day to day at work, I’m reminded that the systems and product we build have real life users. My job is to develop a relationship of trust directly with the user. There’s a lot of temptations to take shortcuts during development from management pressure or career ambitions, but it’s easy to push back if you imagine the user next to you frustrated that their app broke because you couldn’t write a simple test. My earliest memory of this ethos stems from Steve Jobs. No matter how fast you finish coding or how impressive the technology, experience is the only thing that matters.
Apparently he was a terrible person. :shrug: Why do I care? I learnt a lot from him and never had to deal with his shit. Do my heroes have to be saints? It would be nice sure, but the best stories I’ve seen are about complex anti-heroes and he played the part perfectly.