Steve Jobs was young when he visited India, looking for inspiration. Keeping him company on the 1974 trip was his friend Daniel Kottke. The visit to Kainchi Dham ashram changed his life even though months before their arrival, Neem Karoli Baba had passed away. His stay in India was filled with ups and downs but eventually, it made him a perfectionist who would establish — with Steve Wozniak — what would become the world’s most valuable company. Of course, that’s Apple.
To celebrate the life of Jobs and the company he cared about, the Steve Jobs Archive was launched in autumn last year. It’s a repository for the life, work, writings and correspondence of the late Apple CEO.
But Steve was more than Just Apple. He also had a role to play at Pixar. A small group of his family, friends and former colleagues have gathered a lot of the things he had said into a book titled Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words, and it will be available online, free to the public, starting April 11.
It’s not exactly a memoir. It’s not a scrapbook either. It’s a story told through notes and drafts Jobs emailed to himself. Yes, he often did that. Then there are his speeches and interviews. Besides the online version, the Archive is also coming up with physical copies for some Apple and Disney employees only.
This is the Archive’s first publication and the design team behind the physical book is none other than LoveFrom, which is a company that Sir Jony Ive — the famed former designer of Apple — established in 2019. The team has also worked on the online design, which is unique, and they are careful about something Jobs cared about — typography.
Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words will be available online, free to the public, starting April 11
We all know about Job’s famous commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. It’s the one where he said: “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 importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
But there’s something we haven’t read before. While he was preparing the speech, he wrote in an email to himself: “Imagine yourself as an old person looking back on your life…. Your life will be a story. It will be your story, with its highs and lows, its heroes and villains, its forks in the road that mean everything.”
The book is coming at a time when AI chat bots is dividing the world, casting a shadow of uncertainty. Had Jobs stuck around, he certainly would have had a lot to say about ChatGPT and the era of AI. But he has left behind enough wisdom to help us through and look at technology differently. He has left behind a company that still upholds the values Jobs expounded. He left the company in the able hands of Tim Cook, who continues to rule the hearts of Apple fans with innovations that matter. And Cook believes in what Jobs once said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.”