Reflecting on 13 Years Without Steve Jobs

Saturday, October 5, 2024

On October 5th 2011, I’d spent the day shadowing my older cousin at his high school. I remember talking with his friends at lunch about how amazing Siri looked on the iPhone 4s and getting home in the afternoon, absolutely exhausted by the prospect of high school. I really only remember this day as vividly as I do for one reason. Later that evening, I was watching tv when my iPhone buzzed. The push notification that had just been delivered to my iPhone 4 said that Steve Jobs had passed away.

While I had only just turned 13 a few weeks earlier, Steve had been my hero for many years. Ever since my dad introduced me to the Mac as a little kid I had been absolutely enamored both by Apple and by the man who built it. I wanted nothing more than to someday be as cool, creative, and successful as Steve Jobs. My childhood bedroom was covered in prints, magazine covers, Apple posters, books, memorabilia, and so on. I was as big of a Steve Jobs fan as you could get. I’d pretend to give Apple keynotes with the family iMac, I’d wait for every product announcement with bated breath, I’d consume every bit of content I could from podcasts (before they were cool) and the blogs. Unlike my friends who looked up to athletes, musicians, actors, and so on, I was the one weirdo who was fascinated by a company and its chief executive. I remember friends checking in on me that night and I recall going into school the next morning where my teacher handed me a very kind note. Everyone around me had an inkling of what was going through my head.

Over the years my fascination with Steve evolved. It became less about the products that he’d introduced us to, the ones that left immeasurable impacts on our lives, but more about his way of thinking. His philosophy became the basis for my college essay and I have spent countless hours parsing quotes, speeches, and so on. He wasn’t just special because of his extraordinary taste, or his unbelievable ability to pull together the smartest people and squeeze every last drop of talent out of them, or even his unmistakable (and to this day unmatched) presentation chops. He was special to me because of how he saw the world. There are so many insights worth sharing and studying. But it really boils down to one quote that hits me like a freight train every time I think about it and I think about it quite often:

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 you understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it—that’s maybe the most important thing: 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.

My admiration for Steve and his way of thinking means that I have put an enormous amount of pressure on myself over the years. People close to me know that there’s a lot going on in my head at any given moment. Like everyone I have my own personal challenges. Pressure isn’t always good. In fact it’s often been difficult to contend with. But I still view the pressure as a net good. I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the fire that he ignited within me. While I still have a long way to go before I even remotely come close to the expectations that little Parker set for himself many years ago, I know that I am on a good path. The jobs that I’ve been fortunate enough to land, the amazing people I’ve met that I can now call friends and mentors, and the unforgettable experiences over the years all came ultimately as a result of the hard work that I put in. That work ethic can be traced back to what I learned from Steve. I wouldn’t have met and been hired by the folks I worked for at BuzzFeed, I wouldn’t have joined 9to5Mac and made what I hope are lifelong friendships, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to work with the folks at The Verge who I’ve looked up to for over a decade.

I just recently turned 26, which means that Steve’s been gone for half of my life now. Yes, it’s been 13 years. It boggles my mind that it was that long ago. I miss him immensely. Not just because I constantly wonder what life would be like in a world where Steve Jobs was still the curator of our digital lives, but because of what other wisdom he may have been able to bestow upon us. It feels strange writing this, particularly because many technology executives now often feel like parodies of Steve. They all want to be technologically transformational, but they also want to shoehorn themselves into thought leader roles. Steve never really strived to be a thought leader, he naturally became one. To this day, there’s no other person who has ever been able to step into the hero role for me. No one even comes close and frankly, I worry about the young nerds today and who they may look up to. 13 years later there are still massive voids in leadership, in character, and in creativity.

I think it’s safe to say that I am not alone in missing Steve. No one ever truly believed that there’d be a figure like him again. There never was going to be “the next Steve Jobs” as much as many of us wanted to believe it. It kills me that I never got to meet him, but there’s no question that there is not a single other human being outside of my family that has had the same kind of colossal impact on my thinking. Waking up every single day, realizing that the things around me were simply made up by people no smarter than the rest of us is not only humbling, it’s an unbelievable motivator. If you want to change something, you can do it if you put in the work. No matter what you choose to do with your life, just do it with purpose. Whatever you make, make it great. It doesn’t matter the size of the “dent in the universe,” as long as you make one. A desire to make my own dent is what gets me out of bed every morning. It’s what drives me.

Thanks for everything Steve.