Close Reading - #2 "Life lessons: Steve Jobs on Steve Jobs"

http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/06/life-lessons-steve-jobs-on-steve-jobs/?iref=obnetwork

This is not a proper editorial since it is only a copy of Steve Jobs's commencement speech at Stanford University from June 12, 2005. However I found that it has a very strong voice nevertheless. Therefore I decided to write my blog post on it to honor Steve Jobs who recently passed away. This commencement speech at Stanford University sums up Steve Jobs's life lessons.

Lets start with details. Steve Jobs is famous for his innovation of different font styles. He talks about how he became so fascinated by fonts when he was attending Reed College. He says "I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great." In this sentence I could really feel his passion for learning calligraphy. I could see where he was going with this because this came under one of the three big stories of his life: connecting dots.

In the second big story of Steve Jobs's life, I could feel his feelings by his use of imagery. He starts out by saying how he was fired from Apple after 10 years when he first started it with Steve Wozniack. He doesn't merely state that it was devastating. He compares it to simple actions that we can actually relate back to. "I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me." As I listen to him (or read) I could see what he meant and how he felt. As someone who used to do track, I could understand him more easily and thus Steve Jobs's purpose of saying the comparison was achieved. The audience understood.

His use of language jumps out to me more clearly than anything else I could of have found. His third story is about death. How you can't avoid it. He starts out with the story of how he was diagnosed with cancer and how the doctor told him to "settle his affairs." His use of language comes to me and it, in a sense, actually made me emotional. I could feel the dramatic effect he wanted the Stanford students to feel. This is the paragraph that jumped out to me the most. By creating this atmosphere with his language, he is able to get his important message across to the students: live life to its fullest.

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death 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. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true." -Steve Jobs

R.I.P Steve Jobs