They say that the integrated chip, the building block of the personal computer revolution, is built on a wafer of silica – also known as sand.
Steve Jobs did it all and fascinated us every step of the way. His entrepreneurial skill, creative spirit, and insistence on excellence impacted almost every aspect of our technological lives.
And yet, of all the things that Jobs accomplished, what will last? Not just for the next years, decades, or even centuries. But forever.
My heart took delight in all my labor,
and this was the reward for all my toil.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun
Long after the diodes die, the integrated chips chip, and the screen loses its touch, what lasts?
Jobs was a creative marketing genius. We will greatly miss him and his extraordinary vision.
But, as Jobs slips into eternity, we as creative individuals would be wise to remember these words, still flowing to us across millennia…
“And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”