Thursday, October 6, 2011

Why Steve Jobs is my idol

I am generally not a person who believes in having an idol. I believe a person should become what he is,  do what he loves and do it the way he thinks he'll achieve what he wants. Also, I don't think I know a person that well, that I would call him my idol. Yet, there's a lot that I know about Steve Jobs.

Yes, he is filthy rich but there's so much more to him. (I use "is" instead of "was" because this man will stay alive through his thoughts, his innovations and his products that touch our lives daily). Steve is not a good man, eh-aah. He is not a bad man either (well, its debatable). He has shown the world one simple thing. You don't have to be perfect. Because I lay so much emphasis on what I just said, I'll repeat it, in bold and italics. You don't have to be perfect.

Now, he did not propagate these thoughts of his. It was through his life that we could learn.
  • Steve Jobs was not wanted by his parents
  • He dint even graduate
  • He lied to and cheated his friend Steve Wozniak
  • A thief, he in a way stole a lot of technologies while from the Big blue IBM and Xerox (know the mouse we use?)
  • He did not father his own child
  • He abused drugs
  • He dint believe in charity, not a bit
  • An arrogant man, he was thrown out of his own company!
  • He devised all possible mean ways of deriving maximum gains for Apple from its rich customer base. 
Yet, he is where he is, what he is. And there's only one reason for that. He did what he loved to do and, he did it better than anyone else in the world. It may sound very simple, but its never that easy to "do what you love to do".

That is the thing that struck me the most about this person. Steve dropped out of college within 6 months. Sleeping on the floor in friends' rooms, he was attending only one class, the only one that interested him. Calligraphy, where he learnt about different fonts, shapes of letters and how to design them. Maybe the reason we got wonderful fonts in all our systems today.

A great example to demonstrate his will to do what he was passionate about is when he was thrown out of his company. After being publicly thrown out of Apple, a company he himself started, Jobs thought of leaving it all and becoming a monk. Yet, he realized one thing. He still loved what he did. And that's why he bounced back with NeXT and Pixar while he was out of Apple. You have to find what you love, through that and only through that can you achieve greatness. There will be times when you'd be rejected, but you'd still be in love.

Now that's a lesson to learn for career and life. 

Steve Jobs once said said "Don't be trapped with dogma, which is living with results of other people's thinking". And yet I do, and yet he is my idol, well I am not perfect either Steve.

Inspirer, Innovator, Marketeer, Icon
R.I.P Steve Jobs



"I don’t want you to think of this as just a film. Some process of converting electrons and magnetic impulses into shapes and figures and sounds. No. Listen to me. We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here? We are creating a completely new consciousness, like an artists or a poet. That's how you have to think of this. We're rewriting the history of human thought with what we're doing."

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