Steve Jobs: A Legacy

The passing of Steve Jobs yesterday is a loss for the world.  His innovation, vision, and love for what he did helped bring us into the modern digital age.  Without a doubt, our culture's radical technological advances have been direct results of the work by Jobs and others, such as Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Larry Page.
Though Jobs is no longer with us, by no means is his work finished.  There is so much we as Americans can learn from Jobs' life.  Here are some quotes and defining parts of Jobs' life.

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.  By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

 As far innovators in the technological realm go, few can better Jobs.  He did not rely on focus groups or market research.  He analyzed a product, searched for its flaws, and corrected them.  This meant Jobs innovated products that had people amazed because they were radically different from what they were used to.
Jobs did not invent digital music, nor did he invent the tablet.  But he designed the iPod to be so user-friendly that Apple now has dominance in the music player market, and the iPad brought tablet computers to the forefront of new computer hardware.
Inherent with Jobs business model is extreme risk.  Because he didn't have the assurances of market research, he was not guaranteed success of his products.  This speaks to the genius of Jobs.  His ability to anticipate what people would demand made him a leader in technological advancements.

"Quality is better than quantity.  One home-run is better than two doubles."

Jobs strive for excellence marks him as a great person.  Success is often an uphill journey.  As Jobs himself said "I'm convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."
What made Jobs such a huge success was not the Apple II - his breakout computer in the 1980s.  It wasn't even his first job as Apple's CEO.  He was fired from Apple in the mid-nineties.  His success was finally earned when Apple rehired him as CEO.  From that time he developed the aforementioned iPod and iPad as well as revive the stagnant company to become competitive with then super-giant of the computer market, Microsoft.
We need to take this lesson and apply it to ourselves.  Our lives happen over many years marked with many accomplishments.  If you quit after one mishap you will never find success.

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap that you have something to lose.  You are already naked.  There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Jobs was worth over $10,000,000 by the time he was 25 and he couldn't care less.  For him the money didn't matter.  He loved to innovate and problem solve.  Later in his life he loved to push people to excellence - part of why he was a great CEO.
This may sound cliché, but doing what you love is going to make you the happiest.  There are many ways to make money.  You could become a lawyer or doctor, you could invent the next Snuggie, or you could write the next best-seller.
However the "what" in life is not important.  It is the "why."  If you do one of these things just to make money, you will find disappointment.  If you love to draw but make no money, I can almost guarantee that you will be happy, because you are created to fulfill your individual purpose.
If there is one thing Jobs' life can show us, it is just this.  Making computers was far from profitable when he started doing it.  Even when he created his first piece of functioning hardware, no one would buy it.  But he saw that people would take hold of what he could innovate and he persevered until he found success, not because he wanted the money, but because this is what he loved to do.  So find what you love and work at it - if you love it, it won't really seem like work.

I leave you with this final quote.

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes...the ones who see things differently - they're not fond of rules.  You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things...they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."