Lessons from the life of a genius.

Steve Jobs, the man everyone is talking about today. All day I was amazed at how much chatter his death received, in the media, with my co-workers - we spent a good 15 minutes at the end of a meeting discussing Job's visionary approach to technology and how much he impacted the design community and technology on a whole. I never really gave Steve Jobs too much thought while he was alive, but clearly he made massive contributions that have not gone unnoticed.

You can read this obituary of Jobs and if you have 15 minutes watch the commencement speech he gave to Stanford grads in 2005, the title of it "How to live before you die."

Here is what I learned:

Do what you are passionate about, even if it seems frivolous. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy course at his college, calligraphy! Learning calligraphy would be sweet, but I would likely think: Calligraphy? Really, I'm probably just wasting my time, I should learn something more practical like economics or math. Guess what, Jobs said that calligraphy course gave him a love for typography which later impacted Apple. It was the first computer with beautiful fonts, giving them an edge. Crazy!!

It is okay to fail. In fact, your greatest failure could be the best thing that ever happened to you. When Steve Jobs was 30, he was fired from Apple. Fired. It was a heavy time for him. He even considered leaving Silicon Valley, but being ousted from the company that he formed pushed him in to "one of the most creative periods of his life" and on to create two companies: NeXT and Pixar. And guess what, years later Apple acquired NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple. Looking back Jobs said this "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me...it was awful tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it."

When all is said and done, Steve Jobs was just a man, but when I read what is going around the web it's crazy how some seem to think otherwise.

I don't think one man's reflections on life or eloquent platitudes are what are going to save you or give you the life you've always wanted, I don't think he even had a full picture of what is truth is. (and contrary to the growing belief, technology isn't going to save us either.) That doesn't eliminate the fact that he was a genius in many ways. There are still nuggets of inspiration and truth in what he had to say and gave me food for thought. Cheers.