Though I never owned a Apple product have often tried them second hand , loved them and felt sad on hearing news of Steve Jobs demise. But then Facebook posts on and on forwarding his famous speeches esp his Standford one my favorite since I blogged about forwarding it got me thinking me of something quite else.
Humanity loves an icon – something to worship , to inspire , to make you believe in something wonderful and worthy about life.
Powerful inspirational preachings and words can be so wonderful at certain moments in life
but most can only be inspired for that fleeting moment ,
some can seize that inspiration and make something of themselves
and rarely if ever can anyone replicate the inspiration
cause the very inspiring words have a hidden fallacy…
Not that I do not like those quotes/speeches – I absolutely dig many of them and Steve Jobs Stanford speech is still on my list of all time favorite speeches since I first read it in 2005 but yet
I browsed through countless tributes and yet what was in mind was captured here
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/why-we-mourn-steve-jobs/246238/
“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.
However brilliant everything he envisioned was fact is to get him that glory and satisfaction of living his life he needed quite a bunch of people to willing be assembly line workers i.e live someone else’s life.
Its not just him , everyone who talks of be yourself , get a life – innovate think outside the box makes me want to ask them – if there is no box at all whats the whole point of it ?
Fact is not all men are equal whatever they say
Some tower over all others and thats the way of life.
But that does not mean those who are not a match to that towering figure are expendable or have a pointless existence.
They are the very lifeblood on which such towering figures subsist
Working in a industry where creativity and innovation is the buzzword I seriously wonder how any thing of worth will ever get done if no one does the implementation of ideas – the execution and some of the necessary boring work . I mean in a team of 10 having 2 or 3 misfits creatives – different thinkers is great but imagine a team of 10 bright innovative huge egotist team members with no respect for rules .
So while we should look up in awe at the gifted geniuses – be inspired to go beyond what is the norm – we should live our very own dream and not someone else’s dream . .
The important thing I guess it to have the right dream . Jobs surely developed the clarity for it
“It was one of the first times that I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together.” – Steve Jobs
This I say because as many people do forward and read these famous words of his literally
“Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”
They then act and convince their craziness as genius and it may or may not be – but it might not always bode much well for the world I guess
This I thought as was randomly reminded of someone who was crazy enough – has changed the world – died this year and
well has been the worst thing for the US – Osama
Fact is Genius may be good or bad but they will always be rare and will always shine .
Their words are just odes which makes people like moths come to burn in them
not realizing that they were never meant to be the flame.
And then the cliche – flames can light up the world or burn it
Ok as usual I drift in my thoughts and posts but then that is why this blog .
Words are such playthings .
As insightful as always 🙂 The first half of the blog reminds me of the TV show, Dirty Jobs hosted by Mike Rowe. He has some interesting thoughts to share on the ted talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc
Coming to the topic of iCons, heroes and leaders, it has a lot to do with the human psyche and the stories and myths we tell ourself and the society. For e.g. most western myths have a father figure who plays an important role and hence, they look upon for such characters in real life too, whereas most eastern mythologies have a mother figure who is pivotal.. and thereby we seek someone like that in our daily life.
On a lighter note, “There’s a tribe in Papua New Guinea where, when a hunter flaunts his success to the rest of the village, they kill him and drive away evil spirits with a drum made of his skin. Superstitious nonsense, of course – but one can see their point. -Sheldon Cooper (the Big Bang theory)” . I am not sure about the truth of this story, but I guess those tribes have different sets of myths 😀
Not sure about the myths – while eastern mythologies do worship mother figures I am not quite sure they intentionally look for such authorities in real life 😉
But the TED talk thanks for pointing to that – was quite a different view from the regular stuff I come around – esp that bit about “finding your passion”
Hey Yamini,
long time !!! no see ..your blogs are the ones which I interestingly read. Sad part is they are posted once in a blue moon.
Please post regularly.
Rama
I’d been wanting to write something since long but was lazy about it and now well life is so horribly altered , that whatever I do write might reflect the darkness more than anything else . But may be now I will write just as an escape.
The fact that majority of people are stuck in dead end boring jobs is a side effect of a fundamental problem of our society – the requirement that everyone has to work for a living. I think it was Fuller who said that people should go back to whatever they were doing before – playing , writing , building..before they found out they had to work for a living.