Steve Jobs: A Legacy Worth Emulating?

By John Rodenbiker
Contributing Writer

Steve Jobs is dead and I am grieving.

Who am I to grieve? Why am I grieving? Why does his death affect me?

I am a North Dakota Lutheran. I shouldn’t be affected — shouldn’t admit to being affected — by the death of someone I’ve never met.

I didn’t know him personally. I’ve never worked with him, met him, [or exchanged even a single email with him. But, I have given him money.

Am I sad because there won’t be any more fashionable, easy, and fun-to-use “magical” devices to buy from him?

I’m typing this in Pages on an iMac (my second Apple desktop). My wife is managing our family photos using iPhoto and a MacBook (her third Apple portable). My kids are watching a Pixar movie on an iPad (that I pre-ordered without hesitation the moment they went on sale). Our wireless network passes through an Airport Extreme or an Airport Express depending on where you are in our home. I won’t say there will never be a non-Apple computer in my home, but I wouldn’t take those odds in a bet. Since getting sick of the Microsoft-monopoly status quo in 2002 and buying that first iBook for my wife, I haven’t looked back.

But Apple itself still exists. The person most responsible for turning Steve Jobs’s visions into tangible reality now runs the company. I will still be able to buy wonderful things from Apple for years to come.

My first memory of using a computer is on an Apple. Is it simply nostalgia?

In first grade, an Apple IIe read to me with animated illustrations. Mom put me in “computer camp” later in elementary school. There I learned (on an Apple) how computers work, did some programming, but mostly fell in love with adventure on the Oregon Trail. I taught a turtle how to draw on an Apple in after-school programs. Dad brought home an Apple IIe. I learned about our state playing “Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?”. I learned to touch-type and I created my own little games. But Steve Jobs was infamously unsentimental and anti-nostalgic. He killed the iPod mini — at the time Apple’s best-selling product — in order to replace it with something better.

I felt like this when Jim Henson died, too. I wasn’t mature enough to question my feelings then. Now I’m haunted, and feel a bit hollow; something I used to have is gone. It is missing inside of me. What is it? Will it come back?

I’ve spent the last two decades working with computers. I’ve studied them and I’ve worked with them professionally. I’ve worked for huge governments, tiny non-profits, and mid-sized businesses. I’ve even fought cynicism, often losing. I hate to rationalize my acceptance of the bureaucracy that inevitably forms as organizations grow; it keeps terrible things from happening at the expense of keeping great things from happening.

I grew into an adult and a professional. I have more questions than answers. How do you create and run a business that is consistently great? How do you attract others to your cause, to help you make those great things? How do you convince other people to love what you create, desire it, pay for it so you can create more great things?

Steve Jobs built an amazing organization in Apple. It cut out the limits that prevented its employees from doing their best. It provided just enough structure to allow its employees to accomplish great things. His “reality distortion field” captivated audiences and colleagues alike.

However, he was an infamously abusive manager. Yelling, swearing, and belittling people were standard fare. Is this the model to follow? Can greatness only be accomplished by demeaning people when they are less than great?

If I have questions about being a successful professional, I have double that about living a good life. How do you not despair after great personal loss? How do you avoid cynicism? How do you focus on what really matters and edit out everything that doesn’t? How do you know what really matters?

My parents are my greatest heroes and role-models. They’ve helped me answer these questions. They are guides that lead me towards living good life, being a good citizen and parent and professional, towards defining my own terms of success.

If I learned anything about managing a personal life from Steve Jobs, it was that I did not want to emulate him. I will assume he loved his wife and children. But they could never be his first love. He had more money than can be used in a lifetime. He rarely contributed to charity. But…

Did Steve Jobs ever have doubts about his feelings? Did he ever say ‘but’? Did he care what people thought about the way he lived his life? Or did only outcome matter, the creation of greatness?

Is that it? Is that what was taken from me with his death?

I grieve because Steve Jobs will no longer be a living model of how to live my own life. But I will live it on my own terms, without apology, dedicated to creating great things, everything else be damned, and to live it understanding that it will inevitably end.

Steve Jobs is dead and I am grieving.

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