STEVEN PAUL JOBS

February 24, 1955-October 5, 2011

“Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” 

– President Barack Obama, October 5, 2011.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

[T]he only way to be truly satisfied is to do great work.  And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. 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. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.  It is Life’s change agent.

[Stanford Commencement Address, 2005]

"My model for business is The Beatles.There were four guys who kept each others, kind of, negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s how I see In this Jan. 15, 2008, file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new MacBook Air after giving the keynote address at the Apple MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. business. You know, great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.

["60 Minutes" interview, 2003]

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

[BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998]

In my mind, Steve jobs was one of the most original thinkers of our time.  When I teach copyright law at Belmont University in Nashville, one of the first lectures I deliver to my students regards the origins of an idea, that sliver of creativity that some lucky few of the human race get to reach up and grab, an original idea.  Some philosophers and thinkers would have us believe that there is no such thing as an original idea, that everything had a predecessor.  Even Solomon is quoted as saying that “there is nothing new under the sun.”  Any truth in that philosophy is obliterated by the life of a man like Steve Jobs.  –Barry Neil Shrum, Esquire