Remembering Steve Jobs

The passing of Steve Jobs came in as an instant shock that morning as I was reading the news on my phone. While it wasn't as much of a surprise as when MJ passed away, mainly because I had seen that one photo of Steve wearing a black gown coming back from the hospital, something inside me felt empty. When many flooded the social media and TV with messages of condolences and looking back at his achievements, I just watched not sure how I should express the loss.

So after about a week later, when I was asked if I can do a talk on Steve Jobs for Refresh Colombo, I immediately and almost impulsively said YES! But I still wasn't sure what I wanted to say. One thing I did know was that I didn't want to recap his life or accomplishments like I knew the guy.

Soon after accepting the talk, the next thing I almost instantly realized was that I needed to get Chanux in as a co presenter, not because we've recorded so many episodes of a podcast together but due to his reaction to Steve's death, which surprised me even more than Steve's death itself.

Why the majority of the people reacted the way they did will probably take a book to investigate, rather than a simple blog post, but I suspect it's complicated. So rather, I asked myself, what is it about Steve Jobs that I'm mostly going to miss. The keyword here being mostly, I realized I was going to miss his persona, his insight, his principals and his approach to doing things. And so that is what I decided the talk should be about - what made Steve great, or rather insanely great!

Myself and Chanux started doing brain dumps of Steve quotes which captured his philosophy just from the top of our heads. The way I saw it, if we couldn't really remember a particular quote and had to research on the Internet then it hasn't really had much of an impact on us personally. And so except for looking for some great images of which suited the slides, we didn't much go looking for his quotes. Consequently this probably means we might have not got the quotes in verbatim accuracy.

What follows is our presentation slides which we delivered last week. By highlighting these tidbits, we hope that it will inspire you to think differently about what you are currently doing before it is too late. Because our time on this planet is quite limited and even if we believe we're coming back it doesn't matter when it takes a new form factor with a completely new UI and Operating System!

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