This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Guest Post: If You Want More Jobs, Look To Steve Jobs
Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man
If You Want More Jobs, Look To Steve Jobs
You’ve undoubtedly heard by now that Steve Jobs passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer; it’s been all over the news with wall-to-wall coverage, and iCandle vigils have sprung up all over the world. Jobs is being remembered as a pioneer, a technological revolutionary, a visionary. Rightfully so.
But it’s important to give credit where credit is due, and the world owes a tremendous debt to Steve Jobs for something else. He was perhaps the greatest living example of ‘philanthropy’ in action.
While people like Warren Buffet are pleading with the government to raise their taxes and give away their wealth to sycophantic bureaucrats, Jobs showed time and time again that the best way to improve people’s lives is to create value and be productive.
Steve Jobs was one of the most productive human beings to have ever lived; he started several successful companies which directly employed tens of thousands of people. Indirectly, his businesses improved the livelihoods of millions across the globe, from Chinese factory workers to iPhone app programmers to Apple shareholders.
In building an empire and unimaginable wealth for himself, Steve Jobs enriched the lives and livelihoods of others by creating value. Not by forced redistribution. Not by giving things away. By creating value.
Ironically, just as I write this I am watching President Obama on Bloomberg Television trying to explain how many jobs his new plan will create– 1.9 million in his estimate:
“We’re just going to keep on going at it and hammering away… until… something gets done. I would love to see nothing more than Congres act… so aggressively.”
Politicians would do themselves and their constituents a great service by comparing their own track record for enriching people’s lives against Steve Jobs’ performance, and then kindly stepping out of the way. The path to prosperity is not paved in votes, but rather in freedom: the freedom to create, produce, risk work hard… and be rewarded for your efforts.
If you have the time, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes and read some of Jobs’ own words; there are boundless sources online that will praise his creativity, drive, and intellect, but perhaps no one is better suited to explain Steve Jobs than the man himself.
Below I’ve pasted in some key quotes taken from his 2005 Stanford commencement address, and an old 1985 interview with Playboy magazine that the folks at Zero Hedge dug up. Enjoy.
Jobs on -not- following the crowd:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma– which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Jobs on change and politics:
“We’re making the largest investment of capital that humankind has ever made in weapons over the next five years. We have decided, as a society, that that’s where we should put our money, and that raises the deficits and, thus, the cost of our capital.”
“I think it takes a crisis for something to occur in America. And I believe there’s going to be a crisis of significant proportions in the early Nineties as these problems our political leaders should have been addressing boil up to the surface.”
Jobs on charity… and the importance of failure:
“And that’s the problem with most philanthropy– there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation. So if you can’t succeed or fail, it’s really hard to get better.”
Jobs on careers:
“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. . . As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. . . So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
Jobs on making it count:
Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now. And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.
Jobs on [the blue screen of] death:
“[D]eath is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
Well done, Mr. Jobs. Be thou at peace.
»
- 12766 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
Dude, he's dead already. Nothing you do is going to get yourself into his will.
Blech!
ain't interested in wills am interested in giving him my goodbye. Don't look at your wallet look at your heart.
Sad to see how bitter lemon has become some of the ZH sentiment expressed here. Not only you guys don't know how to reason but you seem to not know how to care about those who create excellence and value in our society.
If Steve Jobs wanted to create jobs he would have stuck to manufacturing in USA not in China.
At $199, $299, $399, $499 per pop I am sure Apple would have still made profits.
To me Jobs is a legend for his stuff he did prior to iPod and iMac. He's put in his time at the beginning. Mind you, I've never been much of an apple fan, though I do have an Iphone, however I do think windows phone 7 mango and qnx will be superb and I can easily see myself going back to blackberry.
Now for a true web legend, post 2000, would be Bram Cohen for me.
A lot of people have voiced their negative feelings about Steve Jobs as architect, iconistic Oligarch, of international labour arbitrage 'outsourcing'. In that respect it is true that he was, like the products he made, an entrepreneur of his age and used the global economy paradigm to his personal advantage. 20000 Americans work for Apple and 250000 cheap Chinese. That says it all about the company's business model of the last 15 years.
But lets get Apple's performance and business clout in perspective with the current financial meltdown. This meltdown is totally induced by the FIRE hyperinflated, securitised risk asset economy of financialised debt ponzi. Its NOT been sourced by the REAL industrial entrepreneurs of USA, who made real products in the real world, generated real margins, not fictitious ones based on market manipulation. WE ALL KNOW THAT.
Apple in NOT a WS ponzi. Just the opposite. Granted, it is an outsourced company of this age. So the rant against WS is justified, but against Apple/SJ is not clearly estabished. If the WS ponzi had not occurred, the USA would still have a trade deficit and jobs would be scarce in homeland. But the world would not be at the brink of this financial meltdown. This is the pure product of Financial ponzi play.
SJ could have made his products in the USA. If the US government had NOT authorised the OUtsourced model on such a massive scale. It was a pure political decision via WTO/Clinton doctrine play.
IMO the current crisis has two main causes :
1° For 90%, the FIRE WS finanacializd ponzi. Which has created a world financial debt crisis of capitalism..
2° The US outsourced model, for 10%, totally a political construct of NWO political dealing. Although transferring some first world wealth to developed world was a good thing; this all out Oligarchical play to maximise profit for 1% is not a sustainable strategy.
Steve Jobs was not responsible for either of the two major trends of Reaganistic economics. He just played along on issue #2. Like all other entrepreneurs, he swam with the tide. He didn't make the rules.
great idea. also if u want to learn how to dunk all u need to do is look at michael jordan. yea the problem is we r not all as smart as jobs!
STEVE JOBS LIFE AND THE COMPANY HE BUILT, APPLE, IS A TESTIMENT TO CONSERVATIVE VALUES AND TO THE GREATNESS THAT AMERICA WAS, BUT NO LONGER IS. HE WAS NOT ABORDED, HE WAS ADOPTED. CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE THAT EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOSUS; LIBERLAS BELIEVE THAT DISPOSING OF HUMAN LIFE AFTER INCEPTION IS CHOICE. WE CAN THANK HIS BIOLOGICAL PARENTS FOR THINKING THE SAME BECAUSE, IF NOT, THERE WOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN A MAN NAMED STEVE JOBS WHO BUILT APPLE COMPUTER (HE WAS AN ADOPTED CHILD). WHEN APPLE GOT IN TROUBLE IN 1994, THERE WAS NO GOVERMENT BAILOUT, RATHER JOBS CREATED A BETTER MOUSE TRAP AND THAT WAS ALWAYS THE AMERICAN WAY. BAILOUTS AND CRADLLE TO THE GRAVE HANDOUTS ARE A HALLMARK OF LIBERALS AND EXPLAINS MUCH ABOUT THE SHAPE AMERICA IS NOW IN.
Baloney. Broad generalizations. Bullshit. Both conservatives and liberals backed the bailouts. Both conservatives and liberals opposed the bailouts. Jobs created the next generation MacBook Pro and Air and the next generation Ipad and Iphone. All to make money while operating sweatshops. Soon there will be a next generation Steve Jobs. In fact, there probably already is.
woz just got f%cked in the ass AGAIN. a news guy on tv just said that steve jobs took junk from his garage and built the first apple computer......you cant make this sh*t up!
Yes, Jobs and Apple have been great at creating jobs at the cheapest and shlockiest contract manufacturing outfits in China. Apple ,ales nothing. They are just liek any other US electronics company. They design , market and mark up, but create no value.
I think I know why there are so many here at ZH who hate Steve Jobs, it is because most are traders. What do traders use? Proprietary trading software running on PC. In other words, most here at PC users.
The straw man argument used most frequently against Jobs and Apple is that they use Chinese labor. Well, I have a question for all you Jobs haters:
Where is your PC manufactured or assembled?
Too bad Apple farmed out the manufacturing work to China - where workers are treated horribly....... Apple could have made more than enough money and still manufactured products here.
A lot of people make a mistake of bashing Jobs probably more than he deserves. We should be more precise, Jobs is not a problem but these phony, crappy articles which praise him without any reservations or thought. And they are all around us, provoking and irritating anyone conscious of the fact that Jobs was just a human being, sharing good and bad sides with all of us.
Such articles remind of Soviet propaganda glorifying fictional miners and workers in order to create myths and motivate crowds. Pure mythology, which, in the end, will create even more misery. We are all more alike than we think. There are no gods or geniuses. We should always question those who try to persuade us that such things exist.
Very True, but he REALLY was a consumately selfish asshole too. In that regard, he also really did epitomize the "good" businessman.
Yeah saiyabt but not all philanthropic foundations should be painted with the same brush http://bibiyan.org/2011/11/05/bibiyan-family-philanthropic-foundation-names-ben-jerrys-winner-of-annual-bfpf-award/
Steve Jobs has done lots of incredible things.He has done more than politicians and government did to improve people's life.We can only hear politic's promisses about creating new jobs,we can see an unemployment level that is never stable,all the time it increases and falls down.Steve Jobs was good both at speaking and acting, he has encouraged millions of people and helped them to find jobs and change their lifes, thanks to him lots of people found work places,and now even if they have any financial troubles they can fix it with a help of quick payday loans UK .I think that our world was lucky to meet such a genious,that help to increase level of life of the whole generation, he inspired us by his own example and shown that the most important is to be creative, productive and work hard.Thanks for this great post.