Steve Jobs Stories Need to Be Told, Stop Fighting about Books and Movies

There's a lot of fighting going on about which movie or book about Steve Jobs is good or bad or inaccurate or The One True Source.

There are two things that are important to know. First, there is no one true source. That fact will become more and more clear as time marches on. 20 years from now people won't care about that.

My second item is far more important, though: the number of people that knew and experienced Steve Jobs is, by definition, declining. Instead of all this fighting about which source is correct, let's simply take it upon ourselves to document what we know about Steve Jobs. Anyone who knew him has a story to tell, and all those stories need to be told. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Steve Jobs would be on the short list of nominations for "Person of the Century," and two centuries from now people will still want to research him.

Wouldn't it be a shame if future generations' research yielded all this fighting about which person was wrong about Steve Jobs? Much better would be for them to find your story. If you have one, log it somewhere or convince someone else to log it for you. Maybe it's embarrassing and you don't want it to come out before you die. Fine. That's selfish, but it's fine. Put a clause in your will that it gets released once you're gone, too. All of this is especially true for those who were closest to him.

Here's one of mine: I never met Steve Jobs but I certainly followed his life and career. When it was announced that Apple was acquiring NeXT and that Jobs would come back as a consultant, I recall believing that his involvement truly would be a short-term thing as they transitioned the appropriate staff and technology into Apple. I wondered what Jobs would do next (no pun intended). Of course, as events transpired it became more obvious that Apple was where he wanted to be. We know the rest of that story. But at the time I think a lot of us watching from the outside believed he wouldn't spend much time there at all.

Four years ago today, John F. Braun and I recorded Mac Geek Gab 357 which we titled, "Geek Memories of Steve Jobs." If you want to hear more of my stories about Steve Jobs, John and I shared ours there in the context of how Jobs impacted our lives, both separately and together.

We have a responsibility to future generations to document one of the most influential humans that the world has ever seen. We have the capability to do that very thing due, in no small part, to that very person. Let's get it done.