#398 Steve Jobs In His Own Words (Make Something Wonderful)

The best way to understand a person is to listen to that person directly. And the best way to understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life. His words in speeches, interviews, and emails offer a window into how he thought, and he was an exquisite thinker. Much of what's in these pages reflects guiding themes of Steve's life, his sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the arts and technology, His unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself. His tenacity in pursuit of assembling and leading great teams. And perhaps above all, his insights into what it meant to be human. Steve once told a group of students, you appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, and then you disappear. He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence, animated by the thought that he and that any of us might elevate or expedite human progress. It is hard to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. Steve's gift was greater still. He saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility. In these pages, Steve drafts and refines. He stumbles, grows, and changes. But always, always, he retains that sense of possibility. I hope these selections ignite in you the understanding that drove him, that everything that everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter and no more capable than we are, that our world is not fixed, and so we can change it for the better. That was the introduction written by Steve's wife, Laureen Powell Jobs, of the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is available for free. The Steve Jobs archive put this book available for free. You can read it online at their website for free. I'll link all this down below. You can read on, Apple Books, or you can download the file and send it to your Kindle, which is what I did. It is make something wonderful, Steve Jobs in his own words. And so I'm gonna go back through that introduction to because I took a bunch of notes. One, I think it's one of the most beautifully written introductions that I've read. And not only that, like, it hits you if you think about us, like, you know, that that was her husband, the father of her children, somebody she was building her life with. And to have him gone so early and such an exquisite person so early, it's just …