Steve Jobs and Me

We all have those days. You know, the one where you leave your password list at home and wind up locked out of your own blog, but really, it’s just as well, because you have a frillion things to do and blogging is just too enticing a distraction.

(To be fair, my “day” lasted a good week and a half, during which time my phone also decided to have a midlife crisis, and I had the Worst Tension Headache of All Time, but what can you do.)

Echoes is up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble for the princely sum of $2.99. At present, I’m trying to figure out a gadget or a widget that will let me put an ad on this blog…meanwhile, I’m turning the AdSense advertising off, since it just seems wrong to advertise my book and have ads.

I’ve seen conflicting reports on the best way to price ebooks. I believe they should be cheaper than paper versions because there’s no paper involved, and I know that’s becoming more and more expensive (I bore witness to the declining grades of paper we used at the magazines). There are some that say newbie authors shouldn’t price over 99 cents…I’m torn on that. If that’s what the market will bear, well, so be it; however, I feel that writers need to value their work. Echoes is still much cheaper than any paperback you’d pick up in a bookstore, and at this point it’s cheaper than a latte at Starbucks. With that said, if dropping prices will gain me readers, I may try it.

This seems as good a time as any to talk about Steve Jobs.

I’ve never been a Mac Gal. I’ve used Macs, yes—I had a beautiful iMac in Bikerland (which replaced my stuttering eMac)—and I’ve always thought the sleek Macbooks and Macbook Airs were gorgeous. They just look so…modern. So sci-fi. They’re also wildly out of my price range, and I’ve always been genuinely happy with my PCs (except for Dells. STAY AWAY FROM DELLS), so I never…well, I never drank the Apple Kool-Aid.

(I do have an iPod Touch that I’m genuinely fond of, though at times I want to throttle it.)

With that said…Steve Jobs was pretty much unmistakable, even to a base PC user like myself. The man probably innovated in his sleep. Under his guidance, Apple created a world of gorgeous, functional technology, often setting the bar for other developers.

After he passed, I found a quote from him—I think from a speech he gave to a graduating class:

“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. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationsh­ip, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”

This is good advice. It’s sensible. And it goes against everything we’re being told today. If we’re unhappy where we are, we’re told “Well, at least you have a job,” and to suck it up, because man, it could be worse.

Yeah, it could be worse. It could also be better. What if it is better?

(As an aside, this “it could be worse” feeling just puts more power into the hands of asshat corporations, allowing them to further abuse employees that think they’re trapped.)

I think Steve Jobs loved what he did. He wouldn’t have been half as successful if he didn’t. So here you have a man who refused to settle, who kept pushing the envelope, and who did what he loved…and in the process, he managed to change the way we think about computers, technology, and their effect on us.

How much happier would we all be if we were doing what we loved? That’s not to say we’re all going to be as successful as Steve, but too few of us are happy to get up for work in the mornings. Too few of us say, “I do this, and I love it!” and mean it.

Start out small. Do something you haven’t tried before. See what’s out there.

Do it for Steve.

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