"Let Be."

You know, throughout my years in business I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: “Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.” Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business. That’s what I found.

So in business a lot of things are folklore. They are done because they were done yesterday. And the day before. What it means is, if you are willing to ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It’s not the hardest thing in the world. It’s not rocket science.

I’ve read this many times since it appeared earlier today. Shed a tear or two. 

A sister’s eulogy for Steve Jobs. Sublime. Haunting. Heartbreaking.  

The journey. 

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Beauty. 

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.  

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

Love. 

Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. 

He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic.

Life & Death. 

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

The Journey. 

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.