I’ve been thinking a great deal about Steve Jobs.
Like many people, I find myself surprised by the depth of my feelings upon learning of his death, and I’ve been wondering where these feelings come from.
A common theme among many of the personal tributes that have been written / blogged / tweeted / podcasted over the last week is “I didn’t know him; he certainly didn’t know who I was.” This idea is shared by many, and it’s easy to empathize with it. But I don’t think it’s accurate.
Steve Jobs did know us. He may not have known us personally, but he had an ineffable ability to put himself in our shoes and look through our eyes and figure out what we wanted before we even knew it ourselves. He knew how to build a computer we would want to use everyday; he knew how to build a phone that would do so many things we never knew we needed a phone to do; he even invented a whole new class of personal computer, knowing it would fill a need we didn’t even know we had.
He did know us, and he did touch us, and that’s why his loss is a personal one.
It will be a long time before anyone comes along who knows us as well as Steve Jobs did.