Steve Jobs – The True Measure of the Man

A Man of Consequence

Steve Jobs was indeed a man of consequence.  He was the quintessential entrepreneur.  But above all, he was remarkably human.

He has not so much left us — as he has simply walked from one room into another —  through a doorway into his new future.

He was a man who worked very hard at what he loved, even if that meant an occasional failure – and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

He believed in value and beauty.

He enjoyed his success, but he lived simply.

He was loyal – to his products, of course, but also to his family.

He treasured happiness.

He gave us many a “Wow!” moment, but in the end he saved his best “Wow!” moment for his last few words.

Without diminishing his remarkable business accomplishments, there is as much to be learned from his humanity as from his professional achievement.   The true measure of a man, I believe, is not what you do but who you are.

Much has been written about this extraordinary businessman and innovator, but there exists no better tribute, no more permanent legacy, than the words spoken by his sister, Mona Simpson, at his memorial service. She delivered a poignant eulogy for her brother on October 16, 2011, at the Memorial Church of Stanford University.  A novelist and a professor of English at the University of California, she captured the man as few could.

Determination and Loyalty

“When he got kicked out of Apple,” his sister said, “things were painful.”

“He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.  He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.”

“For an innovator,” she continued, “Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.”

Beauty

His philosophy of aesthetics reminded her of a quote: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

“Steve always aspired to make beautiful later,” she said.

Love

Love was at the center of Steve Jobs’ life.  That is a rare characteristic for an entrepreneur of his stature.

“Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love,” Mona Simpson said. “Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.”

“Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing,” she recalled, “he called out, ‘Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?’  I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. ‘There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.’

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still,” she explained.

Grounded

Despite his fame and fortune, Steve Jobs was grounded and attached to his family.

“Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him,” Mona Simpson continued.  “Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable — Broccoli in season, simply prepared with just the right, recently snipped herb.”

Unpretentious

Steve Jobs was unpretentious and approachable.  “Even as a young millionaire,” Simpson said. “Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.  When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, ‘Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?’

“When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween,” she said, “Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went Wiccan.”

“They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.”

“This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success.  He enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.  And he did.”

Humble

“Steve was humble,” Simpson explained.  “Steve liked to keep learning.  Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.”

Whimsical

“Steve cultivated whimsy.  What other C.E.O.,” Simpson asked, “knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?”

According to Simpson, “He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened the New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents; I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.”

“With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.  He treasured happiness.”

Refused to Give Up

Perhaps his sister’s memories of his final battle are the most telling.  They reveal a man who would never give up, who was doggedly determined to live his life to the full, and in the end, was inspiring and joyful in his own mysterious way.  His sister described it this way:

“Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.”

“Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.”

“Yet, what amazed me,” she said, “and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.”

“I remember my brother learning to walk again,” she recalled, “with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.  Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes. ‘You can do this, Steve,’ she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.”

“He tried. He always, always tried,” his sister remembered, “and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.”

“I realized during that terrifying time,” she said, “that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations. His son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.  Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.”

“One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice”, she remembered. “We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially. I told him: ‘Steve, this is special treatment.’ He leaned over to me, and said: ‘I want it to be a little more special’.”

“Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad,” she said. “He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.”

“None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here,” she said. “On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.”

“We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories”, she commented profoundly.

“I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.  What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.”

“Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.  He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, ‘Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there’.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey,” he responded.

“When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives”, she said. “He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.  Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.  Then, after a while, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us. His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.”

“This is what I learned: He was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it,” she said.

“He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.”

“Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.  He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.  This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.  He seemed to be climbing.”

“But with that will,” she continued, “that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.”

“Steve’s final words,” she said, “hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.  Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.  Steve’s final words were:  OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

My Personal Thoughts

The true measure of a man is not so much what he did while alive, but rather what he leaves behind.   Some men leave behind a history of accomplishment, great deeds and monuments carved in stone.  Others leave their monuments etched in the hearts of those they loved.  Steve Jobs was such a man.

Some leave behind a list of inventions, patents and creative thought.  Others bequeath a spark of genius that continues to ignite our thinking and appreciation for decades to come.  Steve Jobs was such a man.

Some leave behind a finished story.  Others depart this life in medias res. In the middle of their story.  And that story continues to inspire us, urging us on to do more.  Steve Jobs was such a man.

In the case of Steve Jobs that story didn’t come to an end in a hospital room; it looked above and beyond his final moments to further exploration, new questions and glorious answers.  We may never know what captured his upward gaze in those last moments, but as we look backward at the essence of the man, as we chronicle his successes and empathize with his failures, and as we benefit from his fertile mind, we can share in his final words:  “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

TRAJECTORY IS COMING SOON.

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Inspirational American Entrepreneurs (Part 1)

The Light of America

In the early 1880′s, America was reeling from an economic catastrophe called the Panic of 1873 — an event that triggered a severe international economic depression in both Europe and the United States.

The failure of two major banks in the U.S. set off a chain reaction of bank failures and temporarily closed the New York Stock Exchange.

Factories began to lay off workers and America’s railroad industry, long a powerhouse of American growth, was in serious trouble.  Of the country’s 364 railroads, 89 went bankrupt. 

A total of 18,000 businesses failed and unemployment reached 14%.

Construction work halted, wages were cut, and real estate values fell precipitously.

For some it appeared as if the economic light of America was about to be extinguished.

It was a dismal situation, eerily reminiscent of today’s headlines.

Liberty Enlightening the World

Against this backdrop, a young French sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, had completed work on a statue he called Liberty Enlightening the World. 

It was determined that the French would finance the statue as a gift to America — and all we had to do as Americans was pay for the pedestal which formed its base.

A few years earlier, during a trip to the U.S., Bartholdi had fixed on an island in New York harbor as a site for the statue, struck by the fact that vessels arriving in New York would have to sail past it.

The statue remained intact in Paris pending sufficient progress on the pedestal and by January 1885, the statue was disassembled into 350 pieces and crated for its ocean voyage.

A poet named Emma Lazarus was initially reluctant, but was eventually convinced by a friend that immigrants to the U.S. would be deeply inspired by the statue and her words.  She penned a sonnet with this iconic sentiment:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Politics As Usual

Committees were established in the U.S. to fund the pedestal construction, but the project became embroiled in politics as usual.

First, Grover Cleveland, the governor of New York, vetoed a bill to provide $50,000 for the statue project and the work was stalled.

A year later, an attempt to have Congress provide $100,000 — an amount sufficient to complete the project — failed when Democratic representatives would not agree to the appropriation.

The New York committee, with only $3,000 in the bank, suspended work on the pedestal.

Once again it appeared that the light of America, this time symbolically represented by a torch destined for New York harbor, was about to be extinguished.

Entrepreneurship Meets the American Spirit.

Many years earlier, an impoverished immigrant from a small village in Hungary, made the journey to America.

After a stint in Lincoln’s Cavalry during the Civil War and an attempt at whaling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he found his way back to New York City where he was flat broke and living on the streets.

At one point he sold his one possession, a white handkerchief, for 75 cents.

Despite his many hardships, this young man was inspired by American Democracy, and by the success he believed to be attainable by a foreign-born immigrant through his own energies and skills.

He became a naturalized citizen and that same year studied law.

Throughout his career he had a mind of his own.  Often having difficulty working for others, he worked as a reporter for a small newspaper but eventually decided to go into business for himself.  He bought a small share of his employer’s paper — and then with a burst of entrepreneurial fervor, parlayed that investment into several more.

Eventually, as so often happens, his unfettered entrepreneurial spirit and hard work led to greatly increased success.

Finally, in 1883, while so many others were suffering from America’s economic travail, he purchased a losing newspaper called the New York World.

It was at this important place in his business life, as the statue languished in crates on a French pier, that the nexus between entrepreneurship and the American Spirit occurred.

It was destined to change the symbolism of American Democracy and once again ignite the light of America.

The Light of America is Finally Lit

The New York World became a thriving newspaper, and its entrepreneurial owner announced plans to take the required fundraising for the statue directly to the American people.  He launched a drive to accomplish what the government had failed to do — raise $100,00 (the equivalent of $2.3 million today) and complete construction.

He pledged to print the name of every contributor, no matter how small the amount given, in his widely read newspaper.   The drive captured the imagination of New Yorkers, especially when he began publishing the notes he received from contributors.

“A young girl alone in the world,” came the headlines, “donated 60 cents, the result of self denial.”  

Another donor gave “five cents as a poor office boy’s fortune toward the Pedestal Fund.”

A group of children sent a dollar as “the money we saved to go to the circus with.”

Another dollar was given by a “lonely and very aged woman.”

Residents of a home for alcoholics in New York’s rival city of Brooklyn donated $15; other drinkers helped out through donation boxes in bars and saloons.

A kindergarten class in Davenport, Iowa, mailed the World a gift of $1.35.

And so it went.

Americans from every walk of life, from every section of the country and from every economic class, sacrificed for something that money couldn’t buy:   The pride of being Americans.

On August 11, 1885, the World announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, and that 80 percent of the total had been received in sums of less than one dollar.

After the money was raised, and the shipments from France finally arrived, a courageous group of Americans — most from immigrant families like his own — joined forces with the entrepreneurial newspaper owner and began the long process of rebuilding the statue.

They climbed 150 feet into the air above New York Harbor, on a frighteningly high steel skeleton and carefully fitted the 350 pieces in place.

Finally,  the greatest and most profound symbol of the American Spirit took her place at the door to New York and America, her torch raised forever as a beacon to the world.

An American Entrepreneur

The Statue of Liberty is much more than an American triumph.

It is the embodiment of what average Americans can accomplish when government gets out of their way.

It is the best example of how Americans will sacrifice when patriotism is their guiding principle.

It is the personification of what entrepreneurs can accomplish, when they are free to follow their dreams.

And it is the epitome of excellence — that special quality that always seems to emerge when American skills and entrepreneurial zeal are allowed to combine and flourish.

This Hungarian-born immigrant — this man most responsible for the iconic American symbol we fondly call The Statue of Liberty – was in the words of the prestigious medal that now bears his name, “an intense and indomitable figure … a passionate crusader against dishonest government … a fierce, hawk-like competitor … and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.”

His name was Joseph Pulitzer and he was an Inspirational American Entrepreneur.