He Stepped Away
I didn’t have many role models growing up. There was Sandy Cohen from The O.C., that surfing single dad who actually listened—to his kids, his friends, his enemies, everyone. And there was Mian Mian, that Shanghai writer who didn’t flinch from anything—the heroin, the men, the chaos—and wrote about it in a way that made you unable to tell what was real and what she was inventing. But mostly there was Steve Jobs.
It was easy to disappear into his unauthorized biographies. I’d pull one off the shelf, tear through it, then grab another, and they’d all tell the same story with slight variations. The LSD kid from the Valley who built Apple into something that mattered. The guy who squeezed money out of suits in gray, who yelled and threw tantrums and pouted when he didn’t get what he wanted. The one who got kicked out of his own company, only to come back and make it all bigger and better and stranger than before.
Today he’s 56 and sick and done. He wrote a letter to the world saying what he’d always said would happen—that when he couldn’t do the job anymore, he’d be the first to tell everyone. And now he is. And it made me sad in that specific nerd way. If I ever had the ambition to build something, to take nothing and turn it into something, to be a pioneer and not apologize for it, I stole that from him. Every time I’ve wanted to do something differently, to cut the bullshit and just make the thing right, that came from watching what he did.
He was probably a monster. He screamed at his people. He ignored his kids. The stories say he could make someone miserable just by being in the room with them, that he had this presence—this energy that would grab you and pull you in even when you knew the idea was garbage and everything was falling apart. They called it the reality distortion field. He’d walk into a room and you’d be against him, a bird would fly past the window, and suddenly you were for him. That fast. That complete.
And so here’s the man who couldn’t be replaced, stepping away. He showed hope to everyone who hated Windows, made hipsters feel like individuals, gave permission to creative people to actually create. And he handed me a template I’ve been copying ever since, embedding it so deep inside myself that I’ll probably never shake it out. So fine, Steve. Take care of yourself. I’m going to miss you. And then I remembered he’s not dead yet.