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It was a moving and powerful eulogy. Probably the most beautiful thing I've seen written about Jobs since his passing. One important takeaway for me was the quote:

“Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

I've experienced this firsthand. I've been privileged to work with some great web designers. I've forced myself to wait a minimum of 24 hours before rejecting a design and it has always served me very well. Sometimes your first reaction is going to be negative but in a day or so it reverses. I am not certain why this is true but for me it's been a winning strategy.

I've forced myself to wait a minimum of 24 hours before rejecting a design and it has always served me very well.

I've just completed designing a logo for the project I'm working on. Lacking experts around me whose judgement I could rely on, I came up with the following creative process:

1. Come up with an idea and prepare a demo/prototype.

2. Show the demo to a few people around you, preferably those who have some semblance of taste, but they don't have to be experts. If you own a smart parrot, the parrot will do. Since you want to avoid disclosing your idea to competitors, those people should preferably be either close friends or ones who work in a completely different field.

3. Note their reaction. If it is silent or if they say something generic and don't go with an enthusiastic "WOW" in the first three seconds, they are unimpressed. Expect them to be unimpressed, but don't worry about it right away, because even if you showed them, for example, a Paul Rand-designed logo pretending to be your work, they would not recognize it either and would remain unimpressed (they are not experts, remember?).

4. Wait 24 hours. Then ask yourself if you are bothered at all by the disinterest of the people you showed your work to. If you are indeed bothered, it means that your intuitive/emotional brain is telling you that your work is not good enough and that you should go back to step 1. If you are not bothered at all, it means your work is as good as your intuitive judgement is, and you can move on.

The goal is to convince yourself that your work is good enough. Once you achieved that, the opinion of others doesn't really matter. I find this algorithm to be pretty efficient; it lets me hone in on a correct design within a week's time. Your mileage may vary.

Jean Cocteau, at least in one formulation & attribution

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeancoctea100975....

I have to agree with you about giving a design time to sink in. So many times have I been sent designs for me to start working and a few hours later they are sending me an email saying to stop work while they rework something. First impressions can be very powerful, good or bad, but I do think its important to not rush into an idea.

As for the eulogy, there have been so many amazing things said about Steve Jobs, my wife has been a massive Apple fan for a long time and when she read what Obama said there were a few tears.

Almost inherently, however, Jobs' creations were more aesthetically beautiful for their fashion and design trend than their art. In terms of usability, it's another area of continuous improvements, so the simplicity of a product has to be judged partially on the time of its creation.

Does anyone look at the Apple II and think it would be a beautiful design for a computer today? Or the orignal Mac? Or even the Steve Jobs 2nd go-around products G3? Original iPod? Original MacBook?

It is not a matter of hours or days, it is a matter of years and centuries. Bach is more beautiful every new century, so is Vermeer, so is Pride and Prejudice. It is the mark of a Classic, regenerated by each new generation.

But we are off-topic, this is again a Jobs thread, unless someone dare compare Sixtine Chapel (priceless) and an Ipad (expensive)?

1) This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.

2) I finally realize what has always fascinated me about him. He was ALWAYS working, with every single breath he took. He seems to have found a way of taking the hazy concept of "work" as it is commonly understood, and elevating it to a more in-focus ideal form through which to understand and shape his life.

From Neal Stephenson:

    YT: That's the problem with you hackers, you're always working.
    HT: No, that's what hackers _are_.
Apologies if I've misquoted.
The 2nd point you made reminds of Beethoven and how he overcame deafness to write some of his most brilliant pieces. He was incredibly passionate about his work and it was reflected in his music. It's amazing to see read this story and to realize that maybe Jobs' most important inventions, the iPhone and iPad, came at a point of extreme illness where most others would've quit. Passion drove everything he did and defined who he was.

Sidenote: I hate broccoli too.

I cried like a baby while reading the last part of this eulogy. It brought me straight back to a hot hotel room where I saw my uncle - a second father to me - die from brain cancer.

Makes me want to donate more to medical research (my favorite foundation is SENS.org, but there are many good ones). I think it's okay to be sad, but we also have to do something to make things better.

So sad, buddy, but why was it a hotel room?
Absolutely beautiful. I couldn't get my eyes of the writing. What I REALLY like about the piece was portrayal of Jobs as a loving and affectionate human being which is what ultimately matters. Feels good to know that Jobs parted with such an expression of amazement...

Thanks for writing this, Mona.

He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit.

It is scary to think what Steve could have accomplished if he lived into his 70's.

I once read that Howard Hughes did something similar while he was recuperating from an accident.
This is a really beautiful piece of writing; it’s quite a gift that Mona Simpson would deign to share such a personal eulogy with the world. The Jobs family certainly didn’t owe any of us insight into his final time on earth.

From all popular accounts, Jobs was an intensely private man about his personal and family life; something refreshing in an age when celebrity is conflated with talent and young people like Mark Zuckerberg opine that privacy is an anachronistic social norm. Love him or loath him -- and there is certainly enough evidence to support both reactions -- the conversation is almost always about the work and Steve Jobs as a professional. As one who still values the notion of personal privacy, I’ve always been grateful for that.

Yet what makes this piece so potent is that Simpson reflects primarily on Steve Jobs as a person: a brother, father, and husband, not a boss, or showman. In so many ways, her eulogy could be applied to any person who has lived fully and loved their family deeply.

There’s quite a sublimity in that contrast, something I suspect was not lost on Jobs and his family in the creation and dissemination of this eulogy and the Isaacson biography to the public.

And perhaps on that point, it’s wonderfully surprising that Steve Jobs, widely considered an arbiter of taste and design curation, wasn’t yet familiar with Mark Rothko -- one of the premier painters of the 20th century -- until the final year of his life.

I'm glad the stream of "Steve Jobs was an asshole/genius" articles is done. This one shows his real human side.
I think that fact he was sketching x-ray machines, iPad holders etc. even in hospital is just fantastic. The man did what he loved.
Extraordinary writing. Everybody should have such a talented sister at the lectern on the day they're remembered.
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

One can only wonder what he was referring to. Such a well written piece.

It's obvious that his sister shares his genius. I'm so grateful she shared this intensely private experience with the world.

I have a half brother, ten years older. We didn't grow up together. Mona's story gives me hope that there are relationships we seek out later in life that are just as fulfilling, if not more so, than those we are given as children and take for granted.

After reading several articles about Steve before and after his death and after reading his official biography,I always felt that nothing could yet capture the essence of how Steve actually was. This eulogy comes really really close. Beautiful piece of writing. Thank you.
Alongside Einstein's final hours (see Einstein: A Life by Denis Brian), I found Steve Jobs final hours to be profoundly human and moving. Steve Jobs admired Einstein and in some ways he seems to have faced death as Einstein had: with calm dignity, love, and atop a mountain of great work on this pale blue dot of ours.
Beautiful writing. Thank you. I always thought why people cried reading such stuff.....until now.
Very well written, but I noticed that his parents are never mentioned, what happened to them? (Paul Jobs, Clara Jobs)
This shows a good side of him, love. He put that in the products.

Great writing, his final words were striking.

Insanely moving.

The ending takes my breath away.

Having lost both of my older brilliant brothers to HIV AIDS this passing of SJ conjures up many many emotions. Life is fleeting, live it fully in all you do. For the reaper does come, always unexpectedly.
What I really find remarkable about Mr. Jobs is that he lived without extravagance. I am impressed by his desire to teach his kids to be "normal" and I am astonished that he was there for his family first and foremost, valuing love and fun in front of them. His kids (and wife) know a man who did not value success and money, but love and family. It is an impressive man who can ignore the pull of riches and embrace the pull of love.
I think this Eulogy helped give many people closure on Steve's passing. Such a well written piece. I'm really appreciate that she publicly shared this very personal moments with the rest of us, touching.
"He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. "

Instead of charity, if the billionaires or super smarts like gates, larry/sergey, bezos,pg etc can live in ordinary people situations for 2-3 days a year, their imagination will fuel creations that benefit all. Is this not tried already ?

i've cried reading this article. god bless sj
Beautiful eulogy. However either it, or Jobs' biography, is erroneous about who called Mona to let her know she had a brother.

This eulogy claims a lawyer called Mona. But the biography, in chapter 20, claims it is Mona's mother, Joanne, who called:

""" [Joanne] had never told Mona that she had a brother, and that day she broke the news, or at least part of it, by telephone. "You have a brother, and he's wonderful, and he 's famoous, and I'm going to bring him to New York so you can meet him," she said. """

Not a SJ fan, but man that hurts.
Intubated, when he couldn't talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit.

I hope someone takes his sketches and runs with that vision. He's been able to re-imagine other devices wonderfully. To think of what he could have done with hospital equipment is amazing (that at his core, at his most vulnerable, he resorts to creativity) and sad (that he won't be around to execute upon these visions).

Now I realize why most of his products are so poetic.
very beautiful, felt voyeuristic reading it though–private Jobs public eulogy.
that was an incredibly moving eulogy. I just so happen to be about a quarter the way through his biography, and its an interesting contrast to read about "young" ambitious steve vs steve in the sunset of his life. Mona really hit on something when she said we die in the middle of many stories. Im interested to read some of her work now.
Steve Jobs had a daughter named Eve (as in she who bit the fabled apple)? I did not know that. How perfect.
What is more amazing is how quickly someone registered his last words.com
"he didn't died he achieved it" simply beautiful...
That was extremely moving. Beautifully written.

"Oh Wow".

One can only wonder...

I'm glad to hear he made some time for family.
Extraordinary.
Ad at the bottom of the article: http://i.imgur.com/sC0g8.png

I know it's automated, but still :/

Wow.
Wow. Simply beautiful.
Beautiful.
so beautiful.
Beautifully written. I feel I have a lot to learn from Steve. He was so greatly misunderstood by so many. Steve was an incredibly smart man who knew exactly what he wanted, and wouldn't stop at anything to get that. I'm glad he spent his life doing what he loved. He will always be an inspiration to me.