The death of Steve Jobs has not just been the passing of a famous entrepreneur, but in many ways it has been a hit to the American Dream.
The man’s life mirrors the mythology surrounding the promise of America. He started a small company with a few friends and turned it into one of the most successful in its industry, creating out of nothing a new way to make money and bring prosperity to those around him.
Then he was fired from his own company, only to be brought back years later to herald a new period of innovation and profit.
He was a free-thinking visionary and a consummate gambler when it came to trying out new ideas, many of those ideas eventually becoming the standard for how those things were done for everyone.
At any moment of our lives, most people in the United States are mere feet from a product that includes at least one idea that he promoted or created.
He was also the proof of concept for the idea that a child of the counter-culture could come back from the wilderness with something useful for society.
His experimentation with LSD and love for eastern philosophy seemed to have no effect on his ability to exist in the wildly conservative world of big business or prevent him from building his own personal wealth.
To the pioneers of Silicon Valley, he is the model of success. To computer guys, he’s an engineer who knew the science, but dominated the business world.
Heck, even art students know his name simply because he’s the guy responsible for the products that make all of their favorite projects possible.
Most importantly, to the average American, he was one of the few real job-creators and we lost him right when we needed some new jobs.
He wasn’t a rich guy that moved around slips of paper with other rich guys and then through some “invisible-hand,” trickle-down magic was supposed to create wealth for everyone, but instead he created real products and directly employed people for a fair wage while bringing something new and useful to society that we can hold it in our hands.
To Americans, that is the dream. We need innovators who are not mired in the alliances and feuds of existing economic relationships.
We don’t need people so entrenched in old ways of making money that they need to be bailed out by the government because no one else trusts them enough to float them a loan because there is doubt these old leviathans can still profit with their out-dated business models.
We need people who can take on Job’s role of head cheerleader for entire industries. He was a charismatic speaker with a gift for elegant turns of phrase and he invigorated people with a boundless optimism.
Finding someone who can fill that niche is not going to be an easy task even though there are a few with the actual resume to justify such optimism.
We need another white wizard to help us overcome the funk we seem to be in where protestors on both sides of the political spectrum are demanding that someone bring back the promise of the American Dream and just the hope of a better future.