Borrowed Ambition
Role models were scarce in my particular version of growing up. Sandy Cohen from The O.C. was genuinely one of them—the surfing father-figure with an open door and a moral compass that somehow never read as square. Mian Mian, the Shanghai novelist who slept through half the city while feeding herself illegal substances and then wrote about it in ways that made you unsure where autobiography ended and fiction began. And then Steve Jobs.
I went through the unauthorized biographies the way some people go through detective novels—one after another, always the same story, slightly differently told. The LSD years somewhere in Silicon Valley. The money extracted from men in grey suits through sheer force of personality and selective crying. The tantrums. The genius. The part where his own company threw him out, which should have been the end, and then wasn’t—the return, the reinvention, everything bigger and stranger and more dominant than before. I read it all, more than once, and it never got less interesting.
Now he’s 56 and sick and he wrote a letter saying he’s done. I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
And that made me—I don’t know what to call it exactly. Nerd-sad. The specific grief of losing something that was never really yours to lose. Whatever ambition I ever had, whatever belief that you could make something significant out of nothing, that being a pioneer was an available option rather than a delusion—I borrowed it from him. From nothing to everything. No apologies.
He was probably a genuine bastard. Screamed at employees. Denied his own children. Made the people around him feel, through sustained deliberate effort, that they were worthless and should strongly consider the nearest high window. If even half the stories are accurate, he’s not a person you’d want to share a room with for longer than ten minutes. The cult leader. The choleric. The man who turned idealism into a management technique and used it as cover for treating other humans like equipment.
And yet there are all these accounts of his physical presence—the energy he generated, the way he could walk into a room where everyone had already decided he was wrong and leave with them convinced otherwise, not because the argument changed but because something about him changed the air. They called it a reality distortion field, and they meant it almost literally. A bird flew past the window and suddenly you were on his side. That fast.
So the man nobody can replace is stepping back, and the world is doing that thing where it tries to figure out what that means. He gave the aesthetically conscious an argument for why design matters. He gave the creatives permission to think of themselves as the ones who actually mattered. And he gave me an ideal I stole and folded up and hid somewhere deep enough that I wouldn’t lose it. Take care, Steve Jobs. And then it occurred to me that you’re not actually dead yet.