Steve Jobs, Inspiration, and Why I Write

Steve Jobs’ retirement from Apple has affected me emotionally more than I would have imagined had I considered it. Jobs was inspirational to me in my prime years of youthful enthusiasm, before my passion faded in the face of life’s standard set-backs.

Job’s Commencement Address at Stanford in 2005 was a powerful speech, with its three-part message of: connect the dots of your life in retrospect, when you can see where you have travelled and find the pattern your life has made; find what you love and do it; and live knowing that death is coming soon. I’ll refer back to the speech later, but he gave it decades after he was most inspirational to me.

Back in 1984, due to my father’s job as Director of the computing center at Dartmouth College, we were one of the first families to have a Macintosh. We had it so early that the orthopaedic surgeon treating my brother’s broken heels made special house calls just to get a chance to see the computer. I think our first one was actually a pre-release machine. They certainly hadn’t solved the heat issues on ours, because I remember it over-heating and melting down spectacularly on my father’s wooden roll-top desk. The next one had a better fan.

I frequently tested new computers and terminals that my father was thinking of purchasing for the Dartmouth students, but the Macintosh was special. It was the first computer I used as a tool for creating art rather than for programming.

The sales technique Jobs used in those early days had the same flair he later showed at major product announcements. According to my father, he and several other potential purchasers at universities were invited to see the new machines. When they got to the meeting, the computers were still in their boxes, not unpacked for the demonstration. Jobs left the room to get coffee for everyone and was gone for long enough that the invitees dug the machines out of the boxes, set them up, and had them running before he got back. Bingo, point made – these machines are easy for anyone to use.

I was a fan – of the machines, of his sales technique, and, later, of his impact on the aesthetics of computing.

I met him once when I was in high-school. He came to Carnegie Mellon as part of his marketing for the NeXT computer. By then, I had given up programming and was only interested in computers as tools, but I loved the NeXT. In my case, the love was premised almost entirely on the aesthetic pleasure I got from looking at it. Seriously, the elegant black cube was far more important to me than the way cool operating system, though I knew enough to be impressed by that, too.

In any case, I got an invitation to attend a small reception for him. It was a big deal for me. I was the only high school student in attendance – everybody else was associated with Carnegie Mellon as an employee or an engineering student. I no longer remember the details of that evening, but I treasured the NeXT t-shirt he signed for me for years. “Let’s go change the world!” he had written. And for years, I just knew I would.

But then, I didn’t.

And now I am a week away from my 40th birthday, assessing my life as I approach this milestone, and I hear that this hero from my idealistic youth is retiring – mostly likely because he is dying. In Steve Jobs’ mortality, I see my own.

And, thinking about it, I realize I have been following the advice he gave in the middle third of his Stanford commencement speech for decades and have only recently begun to pay attention to the beginning and the end. I have been searching for work I love, where I can make a difference in the world that matters to me emotionally, where the many strengths I have can meet a need in the world, where I can feel good about my efforts to change the world, because I do still want to make the world a better place.

And, I have discovered that what I love is not a thing, not a kind of action, but two kinds of people. I love and care deeply about gifted children who are being failed by the educational system, especially gifted girls and gifted students with learning disabilities, and I suffer with adults who have lost their joy in life and become overly serious.

I have realized, connecting the dots in retrospect, that my life has been circling around these two populations and bringing me to a place where I feel I can help. InterPlay is a sneaky-deep way of bringing fun and joy into life, even the tough parts of life, and is safe enough to be inviting for recovering serious people. The practices of InterPlay also provide opportunities for people who are not being heard to have their voices and tell their stories – opportunities desperately needed by children and families who are not served by the modern models of education. These are the populations I am called to serve with InterPlay.

Even my fiction writing is in service to these people I love. As a child, I never felt more validated than I did when I found a character in a novel who mirrored my life experience. My goal in writing my novel is to tell a story that provides such a mirror for a girl who needs to know that her experience is not unique.

Faced with the combined force of my upcoming birthday and Steve Jobs’ retirement announcement, I am inspired to press on and do my work in the hope that I can change the world for the people I love. I am reminded once again that life is short and if I don’t do it today, it may never get done.

Back from the Void

Yes, I’m back.

I don’t like dropping the blog for the summer, but, there are only so many hours in the day and I needed to make sure that I spent my meagre writing time this summer on my novel and some short stories rather than on my blog.

Summer Reading

The kids are still on summer vacation for another couple of weeks, but I’m ready to be back to a non-vacation work schedule.

One of the good things about having taken a break is that it has given me an opportunity for some discernment about my goals for this blog. When I started this blog just under a year ago, my only goal was to write publicly about my NaNoWriMo participation to keep myself writing. Since then, I have discovered that people respond to my writing on creative process, writing, and InterPlay and that I have a lot I want to say.  So, I have decided to focus this blog in those areas and to develop a more regular posting schedule. I’m still working out the kinks of scheduling, but I am looking forward to writing a more regular and focused blog.

While I’m working this new direction out, I have a question for you. What would you like see me writing about in this space? Please let me know in the comments.