2011: A Year in Review, Part I

Entertainment Of The Year: The Republican Debates

2011’s Person Of The Year Runner Up: Steve Jobs

He lived off 5-cent Coke bottle caps. He slept on friends’ cluttered dorm room floors. Come Sunday he’d grind out the seven-mile walk across town for the free meal — his only good meal — at the Hare Krishna temple. Steve Jobs was 18, dirt poor, and a college dropout. And he loved every minute of it.

He didn’t know what he wanted to do, and a glossy degree from Reed College wouldn’t tell him any differently. He simply knew he was tired of wasting his parents’ money. They weren’t rich. Blue collar, salt of the Earth folk. Plowing through their life savings so Steve could complain about first period Literature class. If he even went.

And two decades later, in front of cap and gowned Stanford kids who may or may not have wasted their parents’ money, Steve Jobs said dropping out was the best decision he ever made:

It freed him up for serendipity. The naïve late night adventures. The joke courses that wouldn’t lead anywhere. Like that calligraphy class. Steve Jobs didn’t have anything better to do so he crashed it. He learned his serif from his san serif. The proper spacing between letters. He shook the professor’s hand on the last day of class. Thanked him for the knowledge and thought that was that.

That is, until a decade later. He was working late with Woz. They were tired, getting sloppy, fumbling around with the first Macintosh design when it happened. Those looping bends, the inky flourishes; they all came back to him.

If he hadn’t dropped out, if he hadn’t dropped LSD, if he hadn’t dropped in on that dingy calligraphy classroom, who knows what would have transpired. We’d still be pecking away at computers, sure. We’d still sift through the fonts. But we wouldn’t have the color. And we certainly wouldn’t have the taste.

IBM and HP rolled out boxy, vile computers with more vile names. X and Z, serial-number labeled monstrosities. Steve Jobs called his company Apple, because apples are delicious and he was eating a lot of them.

Steve Jobs wasn’t the savviest coder. Or the slickest marketer. He was a tweaker. Many would say he was a thief. And the fact is, you wouldn’t have liked to work for Steve Jobs. He was caustic and domineering. He’d toss the latest prototype without a moment’s notice. Leave the newest iPhone in a bar and he’d send in the FBI. Steve Jobs’ Apple was not a democracy but a moated tech monarchy because Steve Jobs was always right.

Steve Jobs didn’t do focus groups. He just knew. He was the Wizard of iOs who brought all of human knowledge to a palm near you. Every song to your pocket. Every revolution to a screen near you.

Steve Jobs alone grasped the nexus of technology and art. He made tech a lifestyle. Our parents dug the Beatles. Your stoner uncle was a Deadhead. Nowadays, you’re a Mac Girl. Or a PC Guy.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” – Steve Jobs

“Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!” Steve Jobs gasped in his final hours. The grand artiste of this world agape, perhaps, at the beauty of the next.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for making tech beautiful. Thank you for bringing machines to life. The feel of Touchscreen to cold, glassy screens. Thank you for letting our grandparents feel young again with Buzz Lightyear. For letting our younger sisters find Nemo.

In an age of Too Big To Fail, thank you for showing drop-outs and graduates everywhere there is another way. To make things. Real things. To bypass Wall Street for the information superhighway.

Thank you for reminding us to stay hungry and foolish.