Steve Jobs

I never met Steve Jobs.

Still, I feel a great loss this evening.

Steve wasn't a runner, as fas as I know, but he had the heart of a runner. He plotted his course, his own course, and pounded it out. And he was never ok with anything other than the absolute best result possible.

Besides, he gave us the iPod, the distance runner's most loyal companion. And that's good enough reason for me to talk about him for a bit.

Steve built a company like no other company in the world, one that took on not only the computer giants, but also the collective notion, the very idea of what a computer was.

Then it was all taken away from him.

Then he went back and did it again.

And then he did it with music.

And then telephones.

And then computers again.

He thought differently. He wanted us to "think different".

I'm not quite naive enough to think that Steve did this for the betterment of mankind. He did it to make money. A lot of money. But he also had an insatiable drive to change the world.

I don't want to imagine a world without Toy Story, without an iPhone to map my run and snap a picture from a fountain, without FaceTime calls to my kids, without the Mac on which I'm writing this post.

I remember sitting in this same chair, with this same Mac, then only a few days old (the Mac, not me), when I started this blog. I can't explain it, but I know in my heart that the machine inspired me with its design. But even more importantly, when I needed to write, the design made sure that the machine didn't get in my way. On a PC, my writing would have been different. I would have been different.

Steve did change the world. He also, in a small way, changed me.

Thanks Steve.

I highly recommend reading the commencement speech Steve gave at Stanford. Read it and tell me you aren't inspired to do something insanely great.

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Yeah, Steve was one of us, alright.

Good running,
Doug