Steve Job's View of Work

Steve Jobs died yesterday, and e whole country seems to feel the loss. From the Atlantic, how Steve Jobs thought about work. You should do what you love.

At the same time, Jobs the man embodied a new way to think about work, countercultured in the petri dish of the Bay Area in the 1970s. The point of work was not to create glory for the country. The point of work was not to advance slowly up the corporate ranks until you got a watch and a retirement party. No, the point of work was self-fulfillment. Your job should provide nothing less than the completion of yourself. You should do what you love, Jobs urged in his famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," he urged the students. And yet to produce Apple products requires that thousands of workers flawlessly execute Jobs' business plans, which is to say his life.

Of course, it was better to Be Steve than to work for Steve. Other people may have done whatever it took to please him, rather than what they loved. But few can doubt he changed the world in significant ways.