Ironically on the morn of Steve Jobs’ passing, the first thing I heard on my way to work was President Obama’s press conference pushing for congress to sign his jobs bill. Less red tape, small business tax breaks, more funding for higher education… I’ve got a different take. How about this America: more ingenuity?
Steve Jobs was a college drop-out. He didn’t use a college grant. He didn’t need a tax break. He leveraged an environment that rewarded innovation. That environment is alive and well today.
If you look beyond the dour headlines; if you can see past the cornacopia of commercially viable crap filling our shopping carts, you’ll see ingenuity in action. You’ll see people creating at the highest-levels. Not just in America, but all over the world.
The best thing to happen to America is the economy taking a shit and scaring us all into inventiveness. Maslow’s pyramid is hitting each one of us square in the jaw and forcing dormant forces to come alive.
This is the Results-Economy. If you’re out there slinging the same tired solutions the other guy is, you’re done. But if you tap into imagination, you will discover that the there is absolutely nothing wrong with the economy.
Never in the history of the planet have more customers been walking the earth, all of whom share a desire to express themselves, stay warm, go faster, jump higher, eat better, communicate easier and/or satisfy whatever need–be it emotional or rational–as fast as possible.
Steve Jobs was a genius and a maverick. But like most mavericks his genius had nothing to do with his products. It had to do with his ideology. He was never afraid to exercise his fuckyouability, be it taking on IBM/Microsoft, his hand-picked CEO from PepsiCo or the mobile phone industry, he was never afraid to challenge convention at any cost.
We can all marvel at his creations. Most CEO’s would be lucky to have one game-changer, he authored at least four. But what I marvel at, as I watch the country struggling to escape the funk of the group-think fueled by the 24-hour news cycle, is that Steve Jobs never seemed to give market conditions a second thought. He wasn’t some Polyanna, glass half-full celebrity CEO, he simply understood the basic human desire to create, play and learn, and he built businesses around such desires because he knew he had an inexhaustable supply of customers. From a a fish named Nemo to a operating system that fostered creativity to a phone that doubled as a personal media center, the guy just understood our root need to think untethered.
I don’t agree that there will never be another Steve Jobs. I think there are thousands more like him walking amongst us (and more than likely they just so happen to be Apple customers).
I truly wish Steve Jobs didn’t have to go so soon. But I’m glad I was on the ride while he was here.
Invent or die, America. Onward
