Blogger's Retrospective on Life and Death and Steve Jobs

Hello, gentle readers...apologies for the lengthy wait for my newest post.

I, like many other families, have gotten caught up in the school year busy-ness and simply have not dedicated time to writing in recent weeks.

Since I last wrote, business ingenue Steve Jobs died.

My mother was a huge Steve Jobs fan since I was a wee child in the early 1980s.  She would lovingly read to my sister and me from magazine articles about the business genius of Jobs and his friend "Woz," (aka Steve Wozniak), who together started the company "Apple" in a parent's garage.  Therefore, I was raised with the new Apple computers in our home.  I learned how to type on a keyboard playing a game called MasterType on our Apple II.

As a cancer survivor, I was touched by Steve's fight with pancreatic cancer.  I was especially touched by his words in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005.  He told the graduates three stories, one of which was about his cancer diagnosis.  He stated that death is a certain destination for all of us, and that because of this, "there is no reason not to follow your heart."

My thoughts have been on Steve Jobs a lot lately, someone I never met but feel a connection with.  A connection in the urgency to live a life examined, the sense of urgency that I believe may best be felt when one is told they have a life-threatening illness, or have faced a life-threatening situation head-on.  Cancer was one of the best things that happened to me.  It has helped me live more fearlessly, and to ask myself each day what I can do to make that day count.  Even if it's just baking pumpking bread for my family.

If you have read any of the recent biographical articles about Jobs, you already know he could be described by many as a flawed man...an extremely demanding, sometimes cold, harsh businessman.  Intriguing, though, is the outpouring of heartfelt memorials that this harsh businessman's death has produced throughout the world.  We don't often see candlelit memorials for a CEO.

I am fascinated by Steve Jobs. I have read and heard many times in the media coverage since his death that Jobs never invented anything.  Not the Mac, not the iPhone.  He made his most money when the little company he rescued called Pixar went public after the release of Toy Story, the first entirely computer animated long film.

I think he did help re-invent our world, however.  A more connected world.  He succeeded by trying to make boring things like computers and phones a little simpler, more attractive and easier to use, and by making each day count.