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With yesterday’s passing of Steve Jobs, I’m
truly saddened, and not in the shallow way of hearing about another celebrity
death in the news. Often, a former leader or big name passes away and the
event is unfortunate, but it doesn’t really touch one on a personal
level. With Steve Jobs, I truly feel the world is worse off today than it was
yesterday.
Jobs was a real inspiration. In case you haven’t already
seen it, I highly suggest viewing his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. In the address, he
makes one particularly touching point: find something that you love to do.
Now, I’ve heard this plenty of times from many successful people.
However, there’s something different about Steve Jobs. There’s
nothing apparently fun about his chosen profession – at least in my opinion.
First of all, entrepreneurship is a risk-taking
venture. The majority of us would rather pick up a paycheck than strike out
on our own. And second, computer science isn’t the easiest or the most
exciting field for most people. You can’t just make connections and
schmooze your way to the top; it’s about actually knowing
something… something difficult and complex.
However, Jobs’s advice
is no secret; in fact, the same advice has pushed many young people in the
wrong direction. Ask an 18-year old what college majors they’re passionate
about. What answers would you expect? Likely English, art, history, music,
etc. Even the students who choose more practical degrees such as engineering
and accounting rarely feel a passionate calling. Their degrees are simply a
means to monetary ends.
This is especially prevalent in business school. The
same students who never raise their hand in class are the first ones to ask
“inquisitive” questions when a potential recruiter comes to
campus. Many business students even despise the business world but are
nonetheless following the route. Steve Jobs’s
example encourages us to be passionate about unconventional career paths.
Society tries to dump certain professions in the boring and hard box and
others in the fun and entertaining box. Steve Jobs showed us that those
categories don’t exist. You can find passion anywhere.
And in my opinion, many technical fields are much more
satisfying than the idealized arts. I’ve met so many failed,
untalented, and miserable artists in my time. In fact, usually the more
talented the artist, the more miserable his life.
These days folks often
complain about too much greed in the business world. I don’t think too
much greed is the problem; the real culprit is too little love. Why not be
passionate about computer science, accounting, finance, or even petroleum
engineering? In our culture, it’s almost taboo to hold a passion for
anything but the arts, but when someone can hold a technical field dear to
their heart, the whole world benefits.
With that said, I’ll pass the baton on to Bud
Conrad as he relates his own brushes with Steve Jobs and how his son has been
inspired by Jobs’s example. Then along the
lines of my intro, Chris Wood discusses biohackers,
people who have made scientific discoveries outside formal laboratories. Some
passions don’t fit the usual hobby categories.
Steve Jobs: Legend and Legacy
By Bud Conrad
I raised my kids in a house across the street from
where Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak started Apple. I took my son
over to see what I thought would be an amazing scientists’ lab in the
garage and was completely astonished at the fact that there was absolutely
nothing unusual about the three-bedroom, two-bath tract home. My kids went to
the same high school as the two Steves, and I often
heard them give talks as Apple grew.
During my computer career, I interviewed at Apple more
than once but never landed a job. I well remember the culture shock in taking
a group of Amdahl (large IBM mainframe manufacturer) managers over to Apple to
discuss joint ventures. We drove a black Mercedes and had suits and ties.
They met us in a conference room with purple wiring and were dressed in
T-shirts and beards. Jobs once picked me out of 150 in a class at Stanford as
not being a student.
Perhaps one of the best early stories came from talking
with Al Acorn at a reception about his experience at Atari. A young kid was
in the lobby and wouldn’t leave until he got a job. The receptionist
called Al, who saw a fire in Jobs’ eyes and assigned him as assistant
to an engineer. The goal of designing games from TTL chips was to minimize
the number of chips to keep the cost low. A bonus of $100 per chip was given
for designs under 100. To Acorn’s great surprise, Jobs produced a
design with only 46 chips, and in just four days. It had been hacked together
by Woz. Jobs paid Woz
only a fraction of the money earned from the design, and the difference was
only discovered years later. Jobs the opportunist and Wozniak the designer
later came up with the Apple computer, which Atari (under Acorn) turned down
as a business venture.
In sixth grade, my son wrote his life’s
biography; in it he predicted he would start his own computer company (called
“Banana”). It was written on the first McIntosh that worked
– the Mac+. When he went off to college, he bought a NeXT computer with
the money he made trading McIntosh computers (not the stock) that summer. On
graduation, with some sense of loss, we carried the NeXT black cube to the
trash can, as the company was exiting the hardware business. NeXT turned out
to be Apple’s savior, when Jobs returned as CEO, because it contained
the new operating system that is the base for Apple’s computers. Last
year my son quit his job at Google as Android product manager to start a
Ph.D. program at Oxford in complex systems; but he has just returned to
Silicon Valley to find financial support for implementing his new web-based
startup, leaving his Ph.D. on hold. So, with the death of the most celebrated
of entrepreneurs, the role model lives on in my son’s aspirations. I
hope the torch of enthusiasm and creativity is passed on to others as well,
as I mourn the loss of a great one.
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