R.I.P. Steve Jobs

There are a few macs, an IPad or two, and about 97 IPhones laying around the CRB headquarters, none of these devices would be possible with out Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs and Apple changed the world of electronics and thus changed how many of us interact with each other in this world. Google, Microsoft and others are just following his lead and it was a very smart path for those companies to follow.

I have a friend that is writing graduate school application essays right now and Steve Jobs' comment about connecting dots backwards and not forwards really hits home for those type of essays. Grad school applications ask questions like "how will you make ABC college better", and you look at it and think "damned if I know". How do you talk about yourself when you don't know what the community at that university is like. We all live in our own bubbles that insulate us from 'the real world'. We are waterskiers and one of our bubbles is the small and mostly upper middle and upper class bubble. That waterski bubble bumps into our high school/college/work bubble now and then but normally there is little real interaction. (an exception is those that pick a school based on the fact it has a waterski team) Our ski bubble is just one dot in our life of connect the dots (bubbles), that dot connects to our family dot which connects to all the other dots that build our lives.


Looking back at your life and seeing what you have done is easy. Think things like "man I was a dipshit in middle school and high school" or "gosh I really should not have smoked so much pot in college" or "That ski trip to Cobles really got my head on straight and now look at me tearing up 35 off in tournaments". But how do any of us know where we will end up? How do you plot out your future. Steve Jobs' had no idea that some Calligraphy course he sat in on would end up revolutionizing how we all use computers. Or how his dropping out then "dropping in" to random courses would in the end lead to a revolution in the ways we interact and end up in an indirect way leading to the creation of the greatest blog in the history of the world...Yes I mean the CRB! jerks...


None of us are set on some path to success or failure unless that is what we want to do. If you want to do something or go somewhere then work at doing it and get off your ass and do it. People that try to say that innovation is dead just need to look at Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, The Rowboat Abides, Mark Zuckerburg, etc.

So without further ado and no more rambling from me here is Steve Jobs' commencement address to the Stanford graduation class of 2005.



Its great how he basically says "I am rich and did a ton of awesome shit that changed the world and I did not graduate cuz I figured 'fuck it who needs it', but congrats guys, good work..."