Friday, October 07, 2011

of iCons

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 .