Steve Jobs is dead and I feel it. When somebody important dies, I go back and look at the fragments they left behind, just to see if I missed anything. I read the Stanford graduation speech. I rolled through a Tom Junod piece in Esquire. I saw the tweets. Most of them look at what Steve Jobs did on a macro level-- that you're reading about his death on an iPhone or an iPad or something. They all say he changed everything. It's probably true.
That's not why I feel it.
I grew up on computers. I loved them. I started out at a computer camp, learning how to write programs on a TRS-80. I started messing around with BASIC. I played around on an Apple II GS in middle school. I taught myself to crudely code in C++. I created little games. I made a program that took raw statistics and printed out baseball box scores. I ran a BBS from my bedroom. I became a node on Fidonet.
At some point, I quit all that. I decided that it wasn't cool and I would rather concentrate on being popular and doing things that would make me blend in. That was the logic I acquired in high school and college: be cool first, then the real you won't be so weird. But the real me, the one that loved learning and creating and programming, got shoved into the closet while I tried to make my public persona less girl-repellent. By the time that I had the guts to be me again, I thought it was too late.
Some guys didn't care, and those are the guys who started computer companies in garages and stuck with it. Those are the guys who had a passion for something and didn't care who knew it. Those are the guys who had a vision and never wavered. The good stuff will come. It might take longer, it might take a lot of work and a lot of failure and a lot of pain and a lot of sacrifice, but it will come. They had the guts.
Could I have been Steve Jobs? Probably not. That doesn't bother me.
I think of things I'd like to do. Things I'd like to change. Things I think I could do better. If I knew more about programming, I could design a better way myself. I could sit down and figure it out. But I know I really can't do that anymore, and it makes me a bit upset for a moment, and then it passes until I get the next idea.
I can create. But I can only create so much. I can only change so much. I can only live so much. I can only leave so much behind.
That bothers me. I regret some things. But it bugs me that I regret some things. I shouldn't. It's hard not to.
Steve Jobs' story isn't about technology. It's about mortality. Death will come. When it comes to others, life has a way of telling us it's not too late to drop your regrets, have some guts, stop watching, jump in, and live.
2 comments:
Very nicely done and heartfelt. Made me think about the time left to me as well and what I might do with it.
That's pretty cool that you ran a BBS in your bedroom. You know, that means you helped Steve Jobs and Apple - even if in only some tiny small way - create some of the stuff and the Internet we all know and love today. Remember, the early days of the web is was only as good as the weakest link - the tiniest BBS was important in one way or another if for no other reason than to distill best practices. Think you didn't help change the world the way Steve Jobs did? Nah, man, as a little geekling back in the late 1980s and early 1990s - we all did, my brother. Don't sell yourself short and don't beat yourself up over mistakes and missed opportunities. Steve Jobs didn't do that (remember the Apple Newton?) so he wouldn't want us to, either. That's the thing about living in today's (and the upcoming) world of the Internet...there are no little people anymore. One man can summon the future -- just don't quit trying. Good read, btw.
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