The miracle of Steve Jobs

If your Facebook is anything like mine, chances are your newsfeed turned into a Steve Jobs tribute following his sudden death last Wednesday.

The man was a creative genius, a successful entrepreneur and a technological revolutionary who changed the lives of many, so the widespread sadness following his death did not surprise me.

Really, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Alas, I was surprised to find it did.
Scattered amidst the posts remembering Jobs were some condemning those who would be upset with the loss of a single life.

One post read, “One dies. Million cry. Millions die. No one cries.” Another read, “Thousands of people die everyday, each person valuable. Why does my newsfeed bow down to this guy as if he were our best friend?”

While I understand where these people are coming from — the number of lives lost each year to war, famine and genocide is truly a tragedy — it is a disservice to the human race to ignore a miracle. And let’s speak in no uncertain terms here — Jobs’s life was a miracle.

Abraham Lincoln was once quoted as saying, “God must have loved the common man, he made so many of them.” In a world where most of us are just that — common men and women living common lives — is it wrong to revere the life of a man who beat the odds to achieve greatness?

History is written by such men. In 200 years, when all of us are long gone from here, what will our posterity have to say about our time?

They won’t speak of the man who worked as a machinist, or the woman who labored her entire life as a secretary, although those people are certainly heroes in their own rights. No, they will speak of men and women like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg: individuals who, through sheer force of will, sought to fulfill their dreams and changed the way we live our lives.

Some might condemn this line of thinking. After all, it is unfashionable in our democratic age to speak of some individuals as if they are better than ourselves. But why does it have to be so?

When we pay homage to great men and women, we are paying homage to the human race. We are paying homage to the best our species has to offer. We are paying homage to miracles.

There have been periods in our history when men and women took leave from greatness. We remember these periods as the Dark Ages; times when the light of genius was extinguished, giving way to centuries void of beauty and full of sad monotony and suffering.

But then, as if from nowhere, genius is rediscovered. These are the times that gave us Socrates and Plato, Michelangelo and Da Vinci, Edison and Ford — the men we would want to be remembered by if, God forbid, humanity was wiped from the face of the earth.

Jobs created products that continue to make our lives easier. Every time you click your mouse to open a new tab on your web browser or fire up your smart phone to get directions, you are benefiting from a gift Jobs gave us.

He also created products that make life more enjoyable. If you love animated movies such as “Toy Story” as much as I do or are one of the many students I see walking around campus listening to their iPods, you are also indebted to Jobs.

During the past 20 years, the way we live our lives has changed dramatically, and we owe much of it to the mind of a single individual — a man who would not accept the status quo and constantly dreamt up ways to change things for the better.

Jobs once described Apple’s core value as the belief that people with passion can change the world. In the company’s famous 1997 ad campaign, he described these people as the “crazy ones,” the “round pegs in square holes.”

Jobs was one of these people. He changed things. He pushed the human race forward, and there’s no shame in paying tribute to him for it.

­— nperrino@indiana.edu