Jobs.

“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. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” 

Steve Jobs said that. And, while I am convinced there can't be anyone these days who is unaware of Mr. Jobs contribution to society, to heightened interaction, to technology as a whole, should that remain a possibility, you can read more about him here. 


Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., without a doubt the company that catalysts the majority of the technological advancements we see day to day, died on October 5th of this year, at the age of 56, in his own home. When someone of such remarkable influence departs from the world, we sense it, we know the shift, the sudden and heavy change in the air. Mr. Jobs passed on an inventor, a genius, an entrepreneur and an inspiration. Right? Even as I write this now, I am typing across the well-worn keys of a MacBook Pro. My iPhone is sitting next to me on the bed, plugged in and amped up, humming after a long day of scrolling through websites, emailing sisters, FaceTiming with mom, updating statuses, checking the weather. I just about never leave home without my iPod, music trailing me wherever I go. 


So what does this all mean? That Steve Jobs left a legacy, one we're all bound and able to appreciate, and that's that? In some ways, to some people, maybe. And even though I didn't follow his career as avidly as others did, I found his ventures and talks interesting, fascinating at times, and these particular words of his wise and honest, a simple message aiming for the truth, and hitting it square in the forehead, hard. I am convinced that in order to urge others not to settle, Mr. Jobs himself must have been aware of what it is to find what you love to do. Clearly what he found himself in the midst of was great work, his own great work, work that moved him, work he excelled at, work he was meant for, work that meant more than just a paycheck and a place to spend your weekdays. (Or weeknights, or weekends, or all of the above. For some of us, the days all blend into one.)


I understand what he's saying about work filling a large part of your life. Most days, all days, I can't understand myself, why I'm committing the biggest chunks of my time to a company and a place that I'm not proud to be a part of, that I don't respect, that brings me down, that seemingly wastes my talents, though that last part seems to be self-allowed. In one day increments, in one-shift-at-a-time sized measurements, it doesn't seem so hard to grasp (usually); it seems adult-like, responsible, almost necessary, from the perspective of money, money, money, an evil unto itself, I'm afraid. But when examined from a larger perspective, when I sadly realize that two years of my life have been spent in a place that has brought me no closer to what I truly want, it motivates something stronger, something bigger, it forces me to want to burst through the smudgy glass doors, dramatically and defiantly, to walk out and never return. Great work, he says? Well, I will find GREAT WORK, but it will have to be somewhere other than here. 


Somehow, though, to my own detriment, or from my own sense of what growing up, what facing reality seems to mean, though that changes every day, I have stayed. I have stayed and I have waited. I don't wait idly; I put forth and expect. I send out for things that I believe would suit me to my very soul, I send out for others that would likely be no more befitting than where I already struggle. And all along I have always thought a similar idea, or hoped for it, as this one that Mr. Jobs has so accurately and honestly worded: that our lives are meant for our own version of great work. Great work that is not necessarily great money or big houses or fierce fame. Though these are things Mr. Jobs certainly acquired, they were not the point. He did something to be proud of, something that moved him specifically, something that we all have to assume couldn't be accomplished by any one else. The bonuses are bonuses. The real feat is finding what we're meant for. 


I never met Steve Jobs. I don't know if he had any regrets, if he would have changed anything about his life having been given the opportunity. I don't know if he would have liked more time to figure all of this out, if he felt like he did everything he could have done, seen everything he could have seen. Me, merely a Apple user for life, I could never know. I feel it would be fair to guess, however, that asserting this idea of great work like he did, of so purely submitting that we will know when something is right, that he spoke from experience, which is the only way we can ever really convey the truth of any matter. He must have known what it was to settle as much as he knew what it was to rise above it. And while it can be easy to think, well yeah, when you have that much change in your pocket, or that much brains in your head, why shouldn't things work out positively for you, think again. Compromising or conditioning what we can achieve is settling in its own way, it's limiting ourselves before we've even set out or begun. 


I think that it's certainly hard to imagine things being better, or even different, when we've been facing the same four walls longer than we care to realize. Time can feel unbearably slow, like it's just outside of our grasp, things can seem like they're barely coming together, fate can prove uncooperative. After all this, I don't know how we can be sure when things are right, but I'm looking forward to finding out. 


And somehow, reading (and re-reading) those words feels more like hearing the advice of an old friend, of someone who understands the struggle, of someone who truly believes succeeding matters to you for more than the income or the status, but for the condition of your well-being, of protecting and cultivating the person that you are. With that, Mr. Jobs becomes Steve, a legacy to be retold, and the words hang fast with a steady echo of the ones I remember most: Don't settle. Don't settle.  


And we won't.