In Honor of Steve Jobs, Who Changed the World

" "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do...." ~ Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs did not take a conventional path. He began working as a summer employee with Steve Wozniak at Hewlett-Packard during high school. Following graduation, he went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out after one semester. This was 1972, and like so many at that time, he slept on friends' floors, sold bottle for money, and continued to audit classes that caught his attention. He later said, according to Wikipedia," If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

And that was Jobs' genius: he could look at things, and see new ways that they could be used. It was not what he created, but how he could see how things could be used, that made all the difference.

In 1974, along with Steve Wozniak, Jobs attended a computer club and he also went to work for Atari. Along the way, he became a Buddhist and experimented with hallucinogens. This is not the way that the world expects success to come to anyone, but it was a time when many of us believed we could change everything, and Jobs was one of the few who completely embraced that idea and hung on to it. In 1976, he and Wozniak, along with Ronald Wayne, founded Apple and the rest is history.

Jobs changed how we relate to computers, to phones, to so many things in our every day life. As head of Pixar, he completely transformed animated film and made it big box office again. Steve Jobs, as the public face of Apple,, was responsible for much of the change in our thinking about technology, from something best left to engineers and experts to something we relate to every day of our lives in very personal ways. He taught us what technology can do.

And he did all of this because he did not choose to fit the mold. He chose to be "a square peg in a round hole," and to see things his own way. Because of that, he changed everything forever.

So here's to him, the man who was crazy enough to think he could change the world, and did.