I’m a couple of days late to Apple’s 50-year anniversary. But I find it still a great occasion to share this video snippet that I rewatch from time to time. It’s from a 1994 interview with the late and great Steve Jobs.
It’s short, I recommend you watch it in full (full transcript at the end of the post):
This section is the most powerful in my opinion:
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
I think this idea is one of the main drivers behind what got me into coding and designing things for the web as a teen. Although I hadn’t seen this interview back then – the possibility that I can just build something out of nothing with a laptop and an internet connection still feels magical to me to this day.
The beautiful thing is that this notion of being a creator is obviously not limited to the medium of code.
For you it might be writing, drawing, audio-visual content, woodworking, community-building, or hundreds of other things.
The important thing is just to recognize the fact that we as humans are all creators by nature. And that we have the capability to shape our personal lives but also influence the world around us on a far greater scale than we sometimes realize.
Full transcript of the video:
The thing I would say is when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
But life — that's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will — you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side — that you can change it, you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that's very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better because it's kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.