The Meaningful Life

The news is old now, but Apple pioneer Steve Jobs died yesterday. There's no way to summarize the death of an icon, but as the Daily Caller succinctly put it, "with the death of [Steve] Jobs an industry mourns."

I haven't been a Mac acolyte for very long. A friend and fellow blogger in the strife has been an Apple Fanboy for much, much longer. But even as a relative novice monk in the Apple Cult, it's clear how much our late, great leader meant to the company, and to the act of innovation itself.

One of the things that make Apple products unique, a quality typified by Steve Jobs, is that every single one caters to the human need to create. From playlists on the iPod, to word processing and video editing on an Apple computer, Jobs took the personal computer, scrapped the term P.C., and envisioned a world of uses for it that literally no one could have imagined.

Jobs at work in his parents' garage must have been a lot like the first man walking on the moon, or when Gutenburg set about building his printing press. Poetry in motion.

Another aspect of Jobs's legacy, though one not always championed by his fans, was his relentless drive for perfection. For Jobs, it was insufficient to simply create. Like Hegel's dialectic, ideas had to be deconstructed by antithesis, and refined in such a way that products got better with each iteration. Naturally, only Jobs could define what 'better' meant.

As CNET famously recalled, when designers, and engineers, failed to live up to Steve Jobs's vision, he made very clear how disappointing a subpar product was:

Perhaps the most telling--and surely the most unsurprising--involves the somewhat punchless launch of MobileMe in 2008. The servers tended to crash and the loading times were somewhat pedestrian.

So, Fortune relates, the Apple CEO called the MobileMe team into his office and reportedly got a little cross.

"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" he reportedly offered. Someone in the room ventured a response, reportedly one that made an awful lot of sense. "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?" retorted Jobs.

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While it's true that my own potty mouth has been known to make sailors blush, I've never had the pleasure of telling an entire room full of people exactly what I think of them. But for Jobs, this was simply life being lived. Others have recognized this quality of Jobs's and called it staying true to himself. And there's some truth to the point in a trite way.

But I think a better description is to say that Steve Jobs was not only an innovator, but a person who lived a life of innovation. Jobs viewed every waking moment as an opportunity to create. He understood, in a way that few of us do, that the only things we leave behind when we die are the things we create. To state matters more simply, life isn't about the accumulation of money. It's not about acquiring more things. It's not about amassing power, or collecting business cards. Life is about creativity on every level.

Biologically, we call the creative process procreating. Commercially, we call the creative process innovating. And when we create simply for the sake of creating, we call the creative process art. When the products of any of these processes are exceptional, we call the general result, beauty. And this is what makes life meaningful.

Like so many of Apple's products, this quality of meaningfulness is something we tend to recognize intuitively. We see it in the bike shop owner who's passion infuses every derailleur housing he adjusts. We see it at the local pizzeria that hand-tosses every pizza crust they make. And in Steve Jobs we saw it with every product launch and commencement speech he gave.

And, selfishly, maybe that's the question we take from Steve Jobs's life - a subjective question he readily answered.

What do I want to create with my life?