Listening to stories

Thank you, Steve Jobs. You made computers cool. You made computing cool.

Frankly, the experience is now user friendly, largely thanks to you.

I hope that your successors at Apple have vision, tenacity and excitement.

And you have a whole book of quotes which you leave behind. Here’s one worth re reading right now:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

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

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

“Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

Steve Jobs, Stamford commencement speech in 2005.

Steve Jobs was a technical whizz and a fabulous story teller; let’s see what Tim Cook, the new CEO at Apple, can do. Big shoes to fill. And last time Steve Jobs left Apple he had to come back to fix it. That’s unlikely to happen this time round.