“My job is not to go easy on people. My job is to make them better.”

Steve Jobs

 

So there was this guy on my friend’s friends list today, and he’s like one of those hippy anti-Apple brigade types, carrying on like it’s all just some evil capitalist corporation or whatever; and he was on this thread where a bunch of them were going on about how the Chinese workers who make the iPads are tortured and treated like battery chickens, and how they kill themselves, and bla bla bla, and he asks this question. He says that if Steve Jobs changed the way the world communicates, then did the guy who made the car radio change the way we drive? You know, basically doing that whole “Steve is not important to our civilisation” thing. Completely ridiculous.

And it got me thinking. I’d been thinking all day, really. In fact, since Steve Jobs died yesterday, I haven’t stopped thinking about Steve Jobs. Reading all those quotes everyone’s been posting on facebook – those amazingly profound things He has said throughout His career – you realise what a Visionary™ this man really was. And He was more than that. He was a Teacher™. I mean, you forget that. But He didn’t just give us all this Cool Shit™, and let our dreams come true on these machines, and enable us to download movies on demand and stuff. He taught us. He taught us how to Be. He changed our lives by teaching us how to change it. And He gave us the machines to do that on.

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