Life and Death
Steve Jobs died yesterday. He was fifty-six. Two days earlier I turned thirty-four. Twenty-two years doesn't seem like much to have left.
After wandering over to the Apple Store, and somehow getting interviewed by VentureBeat, I had eventually arrived home while Sarah was putting Adela to bed and was sitting on the couch when she came out of the nursery."Pretty shaken up, huh?" she asked. I nodded.
"Thinking about your legacy... what you'll leave to the world?" she asked. I nodded again.
"You have Adela. You'll leave a wonderful daughter." I nodded again.
This is true. Even as she said it, I was thinking, "And Adela will bury me one day. What will she say? When she looks around at the world I've given her, will it be better? Will she even think I tried?"
It's not like I need a level of impact equal to Steve Jobs for that answer to be yes. My mother was a school teacher for decades and every time a former student would say hello at the grocery store—their own kid waddling behind them—they'd say, "This was daddy's 1st grade teacher. She taught daddy how to read." Likewise, my father was in state government for many years and now runs a non-profit trying to increase college graduation rates. His organization has recently enjoyed a bit of media success, featured in everything from the New York Times to Gawker. Between the two of them, literally hundreds if not thousands of people are going to be better educated.
My parents are older than me. They're even older than Steve was yesterday. There is time left. As friends forward around inspiring quotes like...
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle....I'm reminded how lucky I am. I love my profession. Web design marries the creative and analytical parts of my mind like nothing else I know (maybe music?) and I truly believe the Internet is the second—spoken language being first and the printing press third—most powerful force for bringing humanity closer together. It is truly an amazing time to be alive.
I hope that Adela will be able to see that these pixels I push around all day are about that. Not just snippets of code or sexy gradients but about illuminating information and spreading ideas, about nurturing a new medium that will one day supplant everything from television to radio to books, about democratizing communication until anyone can talk to anyone about anything and the planet begins to understand that we're all in it together.
That is a worthy legacy.