As a child of the 1980s, my first computer was CoCo3 (Tandy’s Color Computer 3). That was followed by an Apple IIe. And later, a loud box-shaped Mac that graced my dorm room desk at Andover.
The innovation in computing and in technology that followed in the years since I was wide-eyed high school student who loved computers and technology is nothing short of staggering.
In the early 1980s, my CoCo was a 512K dream box. Today, our dreams are processed in terabytes, geolocation technology, and mobile apps and devices.
Today, through technology, we can communicate with the world in an instant, experience any culture we want, learn anything we want, and stretch our productivity to new limits.
Thickly layered in this, our post-industrial, technological epoch (or revolution) was Steve Jobs.
The man who pioneered computers and technology, and took his dream to enrich the lives of people to the whole world, died yesterday. Steve Jobs was 56 years old.
And while many over the coming days and weeks will salute his career, it was his philosophy of making things that were at “the intersection of art and technology” and the concept to “think different” that really gets to the heart of what the life of Steve Jobs can teach us.
In business and in government, we need to ask ourselves, “How are we moving to create things that truly intersect with art and technology? How are we thinking differently than we have before? How are we enriching the lives of the people around us?”
Steve Jobs was undoubtedly an iconic figure. But his dreams, surrounded by successes and failures, all had two common elements: ideas and decisions. Ideas around delivering technology that enhanced our lives, and decisions to think broadly and differently, and to make the ideas into reality no matter what it took to get there.
In the end, there is nothing iconic about that. It is within each of us to dream, and it is within each of us to do.
Michael Hackmer is the Senior Community Manager of GovWin, a Deltek network that helps government contractors win new business every day. This post originally appeared on GovWin.com at: http://govwin.com/michael-hackmer_blog/what-steve-jobs-teaches-us/261844. Hackmer can be reached at [email protected], or you can follow him on Twitter @hackmer.
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — Steve Jobs, Interview with Business Week, 1998
I was a proud owner of a Apple 2e right out of college, and a number of Macs since then. iPods, Nanos, iPhones and iPads. Even a Newton.
But I encourage us all to post as our status today, at leadt for a while, Steve Jobs iconic statement and greatest lesson:
“Your time if limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”.
I still have 250 mac classics. They run my first electronic literature piece, Marble Springs, created when Dos was still wavy green text on a black background–and Macs had graphics.