Saturday, April 28, 2012

Steve Jobs’ Last Words: Oh Wow!

October 30, 2011 by  
Steve Jobs’ sister, Mona Simpson wrote a moving Eulogy for him and it was published by the New York Times.  In it she tells that … Steve’s final words were:
“OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”
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She also goes on to list  things that she learned from her brother and she lists them…. :
Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day. That’s incredibly simple, but true.
He was the opposite of absent-minded.
He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.
When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.
He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.
Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.
For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.
He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.
His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.
He was willing to be misunderstood.
Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.
Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.
Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.
With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun. He treasured happiness.
He was a special man indeed. You can read the rest of Mona’s eulogy on The New York Times.