Take no offense. Steve Jobs is a great man. Personally, I owned three different iPods: the 1st generation iPod Shuffle, the 3rd generation iPod nano and the 2nd generation iPod Touch. I have dabbled in Mac OS X (via a Hackintosh I tried to run on VirtualBox), helped to configure Mac Books, iPhones and iPads belonging to friends. My next laptop is probably a Mac Book Pro as well (after I graduate though). Steve Jobs has many points we can learn from; and he is a model that almost every professors and adjunct lecturers in SMU use, regardless of the diversity of the topics covered.
Still the thought of writing a post solely on this great persona did not occur to me until I played the devil’s advocate in my friend’s picture post:
One die, Thousands cry
Thousands die, no one cry
Now, anyone would be inflamed by this line, given that Steve Jobs has just died. However, he did raise a point: Steve Jobs is dead, now what?
After a lengthy discussion online, he came up a personal eulogy, one which I share sentiments with:
Death eventually comes to all humans. I do feel the loss when I heard of steve jobs death. He was indeed a visionary man and have changed the world. His death had generated tons of news about him, newspapers rang frontpages of Steve Jobs history and about the world he had changed. Companies and social media went into a heightened frenzy, creating pages and events to commemorate his life.
This world has 6.97 billion lives, and yet the world seems to revolve around 1 man. I would dare say that my local newspaper find it more profiting to run a story that people would read than to raise awareness for the poor auntie I see living below my hdb, or even running full page cover story on the malnourished and dying children in africa. I would dare say that even though hundreds of children are dying by the minutes in differet parts of the world, they would still remain under wraps as the world seem more fascinated in profitable news.
I mourn Steve Jobs as I speak, but this world still revolves and will never stop spinning. It is time to move on and to care for the less previliged people around you. They may not have created the iPhone nor changed the world, but they would have made a difference in someone else’s life, and their lives are of no less value than Steve Job himself.
Friends, the last chapter of someone’s life has been written and cast in stone. Now, let us be involved in shaping the story of someone less privileged and may he be the next Steve Jobs of his generation.
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
– Steve Jobs, from his commencement address at Stanford University, 2005
Image: screenshot from http://www.facebook.com/ccp.chinleng/posts/258116934223677
Eulogy written by Ong Chin Leng, a friend suffering slogging together in SMU. Note: minor edits done to rectify language use.
Transcript taken from here. Steve Job’s commencement speech can be viewed on YouTube.