I love Apple and the products they create. I always had an interest in gadgets but was too busy playing guitar and trying to keep an old Dell laptop working to take it much further than that. It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago and bought my first Macbook Pro that I fell in love technology. There is something in the design of Apple products that makes them a pleasure to use, and that is thanks to the vision and genius of Steve Jobs.
Tributes to Steve are all over the internet right now, and rightly so, but I think there is a greater tragedy in his death that hasn’t been picked up on. I was reading a post about the biography of Steve Jobs where the author was talking about why Steve had decided to be so open with him after such a history of keeping things close to the chest. Here is Steve’s response.
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”
For a man to accomplish so much, running a company in such a hands on way other areas of life had to budge. Think about all the time Steve spent working, and then think about that time subtracted from his children. That is a sacrifice he made to create what he did.
I don’t want to read to much into this quote and assume things. So I will stop here, and simply say that I think this is representative of a sad pattern in our country today. The pattern that parents leave most of the parenting of their children up to their daily caretakers. Our kids need us. Lets not ignore our children while we’re out looking to change the world. Let us actively seek balance.