Steve Jobs the Re-inventor

Good morning my fellow Rotarians.  Just last week America lost one of it the greatest entrepreneurs of the last century, Apple founder Steve Jobs.  Simply put Jobs took us into the digital age as he led change from vinyl, tapes, film, paper and other physical formats to digital ones.  And no better way to offer a tribute to this man than to share a few quotes…

I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

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.

Steve Jobs was often compared to Thomas Edison, both being very rare people who only come along once a century.  Yet they were different.  Edison was the inventor who had a vision for things never seen before.  Jobs was the re-inventor who saw things as they were and had a vision to make them better.    

Steve Jobs, dead at 56, a man who clearly made a very positive impact on our world.  And that is the bottom of our news on this Friday, October 14, 2011. 
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