Sharing a “find” – Steve Jobs’ collected words, “Make Something Wonderful”

Make Something Wonderful is a compilation of Steve Jobs’ own words, taken from a variety of formal and informal texts, and published in “book” form on the “Steve Jobs Archive” website, which describes itself as “the authoritative home for Steve’s story and a resource for new generations eager to make their own mark.”

photo of the "Make Something Wonderful" book collection of Steve Jobs' own words

DavidCWG, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Although the Steve Jobs Archive website has existed for a few years now (link HERE), I only just stumbled across it today as I was prepping for the new semester that starts next week.

You can link to Wikipedia’s article on Make Something Wonderful HERE and link to the book itself HERE.

Once you click over to the book, the first thing you see is a blank rectangle that slides up onto your screen and slowly reveals itself as a 1970s-era image of Jobs as a tuxedoed young man in the form of a self-developing Polaroid-type snapshot. (Metaphor, anyone?)

Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, says in her “Introduction” to the book that the best way to get to know someone is through their own words, directly, unmediated by another’s framing (my paraphrase there) and that therefore, “the best way to understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life,” via speeches, inteviews, and emails.

“In these pages, Steve drafts and refines. He stumbles, grows, and changes,” Powell Jobs says.

I’ve only skimmed through the book so far, but she’s right. This is not a refined, coherent text. But that’s okay; it’s something better.

And frankly, I think the messiness is more in keeping with Jobs’ intuitive approach to life anyway. From these fragmentary textual “snapshots,” you start getting a “feel” for the context of who Jobs was and the meaning found outside the boundaries of what he actually said—kind of a gestalt understanding that transcends the facts.

Not sure I’m saying that well, but in some ways this collection of raw material is like poetry. You don’t read it for information; you read it to see things “fresh” and to feel something “true” in your bones.

Which in some ways is the point of a “self-help” text read for inspiration. Affirmations and the like help people envision a future for themselves that may not currently even be on the horizon. If you’ve never seen something before, you can’t imagine it easily. And it’s hard to keep going if you don’t believe there’s a destination waiting for you or that you have what it takes to get there.

I often think of that quote attributed to Henry Ford:

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.

The Internet says (and ChatGPT confirms 🙂 ) that Ford’s words can’t be traced to an original source, except for a 1947 unsourced ascription published in Readers Digest following Ford’s death. And apparently similarly worded statements were already in circulation long before that. For our purposes, though, the actual source doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that this sentiment is so widely held. It seems self-evident because it feels so true.

Which is why I love this last sentence of Laurene Powell Jobs’  introduction:

I hope these selections ignite in your the understanding that drove him: that everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter, no more capable, than we are; that our world is not fixed—and so we can change it for the better.

I can’t think of a better argument for the value of reading this collection of her husband’s words.

If life is a journey, not a destination, how do you pack?

This was a question/prompt for a writing exercise done for a meeting of my writing group in December 2022. I came across it today going through folders to organize ephemera related to some larger writing projects. Seeing it again now, I thought it had some fun associations and wordplay, just a nice little metaphor/allegory for life that might give someone a smile or a bit of inspiration, so I decided to share 🙂

Roger Cornfoot / The long and winding road, CC BY-SA 2.0

Question: If life is a journey, not a destination, how do you pack?

Answer: Well, are you traveling fast or slow? Are you staying at the Palmer House or at a Motel 6? Do you pack sandwiches to eat in the car? Stop at roadside rest and cook hamburgers and hotdogs on one of those old grills for a picnic? Drive through McDonald’s at an exit off the interstate? Or do you travel along a “Blue Highway“ and stop at a little mom-and-pop diner?

What is your mode of transportation? Are you hiking? Biking? Motorcycling? Driving? Are you taking a Greyhound bus? Are you flying? Taking the train, And if so, are you traveling coach, sleeper car, or private bedroom? Are you making a transatlantic voyage on an ocean liner?

Do you prefer traveling solo or as part of a group quest?

All of these things will influence what you need to pack. I recently saw a photo of an old steamer trunk that folded open to create a chest of drawers. Another opened out to reveal a closet full of dresses. If you were traveling first class on the Titanic, this is probably how you would pack. Except you wouldn’t have done the packing, your maid would have. That’s a very different type of journey than the one involving a backpack and a good pair of shoes along a dirt road.

Finally, even though life is a journey, not a destination, it is helpful to know where you’re going. The road to heaven looks quite different from the road to hell, for example, and you’ll need to pack accordingly.

Hell is easy. You can pack light if you’re going to hell. According to my grandmother, you won’t even need a suitcase; a handbasket will do. The road to hell is easy to traverse, as it has a “slippery slope” and is paved with “good intentions.” And it is also easy to find. Just fall in with the wrong crowd; they will take you with them.

Getting to heaven, on the other hand, can be confusing. As a popular song once told us, paradoxically, “If you wanna get to heaven, you gotta raise a little hell.”

If you want to go to Heaven, you may find a good guidebook absolutely essential. Several good ones exist—for example, the Bible, the Torah, and the Quaran—but they require close reading and ongoing consultation.

One last perspective regarding the “journey” comes from this passage of literary advice from a favorite author, J. R. R. Tolkien, in which hobbit Bilbo Baggins shares his thoughts on travel with his nephew:

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

A scenario that pretty much eradicates anyone’s ability to plan or pack!

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

[NOTE – This is a “draft” post from 14 years ago that I just now stumbled across as I was searching for things I have written about movies. I can’t provide any more context than that for this post, and I don’t know why I never hit “publish” back in 2012 when I first wrote it. I got distracted? I wanted to polish it up a little more before putting it out into the world? Who knows! But here it is at last, for what it’s worth, in the raw and better late than never.]

Or, ignorance is bliss.

The title of today’s post, of course, comes from one of the final scenes in The Wizard of Oz.  Dorothy and her friends have returned to Oz with the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.  In exchange, the Wizard is supposed to grant them their wishes, but in their audience with him, The Great and Powerful Oz is stalling, telling them to come back tomorrow.  Toto, cute little rat terrier that he is, trots over to a curtain at the side of the room and draws it back to expose a man energetically working the levers of the concealed control booth.  (Actually Toto is officially a Cairn Terrier, but dogs of this breed are “ratters,” and don’t you just love the idea of Toto being the only character who “smells a rat” in this scene?)

Toto pulling back the curtain to reveal the real Wizard of Oz

Yesterday’s Google Doodle indirectly got me thinking about the way we (well, I, anyway) always want to know the inner workings of a piece of art.

Yes, I can simply experience and enjoy art for what it is, on its own and without analysis.  In fact, my first encounter with any work of art is always one of sheer, aesthetic bliss.  When I see a movie in the theater, I’m as close to the screen as my companion will tolerate, munching on popcorn and gazing up in wonder at the marvelous, larger-than-life motion picture.

But at some point, if a film or photo or sculpture has “lingered” with me, I start to feel a little restless, to get a little “itch” to go deeper. Why has this particular artwork stayed with me? What makes it “tick”?

The Birth of a Nation is considered enormously important in the development of feature-length narrative cinema, a film in which story and characters are fully developed and the footage edited to craft a compelling, long-form story. Most discussion of this film today centers on its racist assumptions and images, which are repugnant to modern American viewers.

The film premiered in 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War in 1865, and it did, indeed, present a highly consequential—and profoundly racist—interpretation of the postwar era of Reconstruction.

But what did it mean for an audience to encounter that particular representation of history at that particular historical moment?

The Birth of a Nation toured the United States like any other traveling “show” of the day.  It was booked into civic center auditoriums – again, to mark that 50th anniversary of the Civil War’s end – and viewing this film in that context was a communal theatrical experience, complete with an intermission.

I try to imagine how going to see the “show” might have been considered an observance somewhat akin to putting flowers on Civil War veterans’ graves. The film also contains a facsimile reproduction of Lincoln’s assassination, an event within living memory of many people still alive in 1915 – but at a time long before YouTube, network television, or newsreels could have captured and indelibly preserved it. What must it have been like for those audiences to vicariously participate in the first Presidential assassination, a monumental event in America’s history?

This is the way my mind starts to wander (and wonder) the intial exposure to a work of art has passed.

Searching for meaning is a basic human impulse, and an artwork’s meaning can be found in many places. You can look to a work’s creator. You can analyze its structure or form (formal analysis). You can examine the cultural context of the society or historical period from which it emerged.

After the terrible movie-theater massacre in Colorado a few weeks ago, the cause-and-effect relationship between onscreen and offscreen violence was the subject of much discussion. As with the chicken-egg conundrum, it doesn’t really matter which comes first . . . and, actually, it’s impossible to determine anyway. The question of whether violent images can influence violent behavior has produced decades of research and controversy, particularly concerning children.

The more compelling version of this question may be: What happens when art crosses the boundary between representation and reality?

Ignorance may be bliss, but as the poem from which that line is taken makes clear, only children can and should be shielded from reality as long as possible. At its deepest, most meaningful level, art is about reality. Delving beyond the surface beauty (or ugliness) of any artwork allows you to move beyond the material itself to connect with something else . . . eternal, unfettered, transcendent.

[FURTHER NOTE – Maybe I was too traumatized by the movie-theater killings in Aurora, Colorado, at the midnight screening of  The Dark Knight Rises. It’s possible I was trying to process the horror by thinking about it in terms of art and senseless violence. In reading through this blog post today, I was very confused by the Google Doodle reference, but with the help of ChatGPT and the version-control time stamps on the draft, I figured out that I started writing this post on July 14, 2012, referring to this Google Doodle celebrating 150 years of Gustav Klimt. Then for some reason, I added in the reference to the July 20, 2012, movie theater killings several weeks later, on August 6 and 8. I must have intuited a strong connection at the time, but I have a feeling that I found the whole thing too excruciating to grapple with in writing. Sometimes words are completely inadequate.]

(Somer) Sault Ste. Marie

Our dog is never happier than when she’s outside on a sunny day, soaking up the rays in her backyard.

On the other hand, she is terrified of thunderstorms, to the point where she needs medication (trazodone) to get through the thunder and lightning. Even a light drizzle is traumatic. She’ll freeze at the sound of raindrops splashing against the windows, and on overcast days, she glances nervously up at the sky as if anticipating a cloudburst at any moment.

I maintain near-constant monitoring of the weather forecast, as a result. Multiple weather forecasts, in fact:

  • Apple’s weather app
  • Google’s featured 10-day forecast for Milwaukee
  • Every Milwaukee television station’s website weather page

One local station includes continually-updating weather radar, so this website has become my “go to.” To be fair, Apple’s weather app also has updating radar. But the map itself on Apple’s app is completely white except for place names in black text and gray lines showing state borders, etc. Channel 6, on the other hand, uses satellite images showing actual physical features of the landscape.

Plus, although the weather system colors on Apple are aesthetically pleasing, in a range of pinks and purples, they are quite bland and limited compared with the sweeping palette offered on Channel 6: green for ordinary rain; yellow and red for heavier rain with thunder and lightning; and magenta/purple for a storm’s really scary, intense areas (like heavy rain, hail, and tornados).

VERY dramatic. Like: Uh oh, time for the trazodone.

Radar showing storm approaching Milwaukee metro area

But wait. What was the title of this blog post again?

Yes, I’m coming around to that 🙂

The best time to give our dog her trazodone is about 45 minutes ahead of a storm. That way she has a chance to get stupefied relaxed before the first thunder rolls and raindrops hit.

Timing her meds is kind of an art.

We hate giving her the drug for no reason, like if a storm fizzles out before reaching us, which sometimes happens. Or if, as happens other times, I kid you not, a giant storm splits as it approaches our section of Milwaukee, sending its two halves eastward around us like the Red Sea parting for Moses. You know how they talk about urban areas having microclimates? Sometimes I wonder if there’s some unseen temperature or air pressure phenomenon popping up that intercepts approaching storms and diverts them around the metro area.

But anyway, recently I was looking at the radar, checking out the progression of a storm system across the state of Wisconsin in an attempt to decide the odds of the red/yellow storms hitting Milwaukee. To get a feel for the overall rotation range of the entire system’s “low,” I zoomed out, away from Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin, to take in the entire state, including Michigan’s upper peninsula and the area surrounding Lake Superior.

Which is when I happened to notice that there are two cities of Sault St. Marie up there on the far eastern end of Michigan’s UP. One on the USA  side of the border and one on the Canada side. The Soo Locks are right there on the St. Mary River between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, so of course, it makes sense that the city would grow outward in a circle from that spot instead of being concentrated entirely on the U.S. side, with nothing across the border.

Then I thought about how Kansas City similarly straddles a border (between Kansas and Missouri), and I wondered if there was a special term for a city like that. The answer is yes, of course. Multiple terms, in fact, depending on whether the boundary/border lies between states or countries:

  • Divided cities – one city divided by a border
  • Transborder Agglomeration / Conurbation – large urban region or metro area spanning two or more states or countries
  • Twin cities – two separate cities sitting right across the border from each other

Some well-known examples across state boundaries in the U.S., (taken straight from Google’s AI overview) include the following:

  • Texarkana (Texas and Arkansas) – Famous for State Line Avenue, which splits the community, and a federal courthouse that physically straddles both states.
  • Bristol (Virginia and Tennessee) – Shares a main street (State Street) dividing the two distinct municipal governments.
  • Kansas City (Missouri and Kansas) – Often confused as a single entity, these are two completely separate neighboring cities divided by State Line Road within a shared metropolitan area.
  • Union City (Indiana and Ohio) – adjoined municipalities split down the state boundary.

So that was interesting to learn!

And ChatGPT informs me that the term “twin cities” (or “sister” cities in some contexts) refers to two adjacent cities on opposite sides of a border that function closely together but remain separate municipalities. Examples include:

  • El Paso and Ciudad Juárez
  • Sault Ste. Marie and Sault Ste. Marie

Well, I got the answer to my question, and that would have been the end of that little trip down the rabbit hole—except then I thought about the name of Sault Ste. Marie and wondered why it is pronounced the way it is. It looks (and is) French, thanks to the original French explorers and fur traders, but the spelling of the “Soo Locks” reinforces the “Soo” sound instead of a more French-sounding “Sohl” (long “o” with just a barest hint of that “l” at the end) pronunciation.

I didn’t find the answer to that pronunciation question, but in looking up the word “sault” in French, I discovered that (again thanks to Google’s AI-enhanced summary), ”In older and colonial French, sault (modern spelling: saut) means a leap, jump, or waterfall/rapids (from the idea of water “leaping” over rocks).

I loved that image of water leaping and tumbling over the rapids that pre-existed the Soo Locks.

Which—finally!—brings me to the point of today’s post, as hinted at by its title. That image of “tumbling” made me wonder about the origin of “somersault.”

The word “somersault” (again courtesy of Google’s AI summary, relying on Reddit and a Saturday Evening Post article) comes from “the Old Provençal word sobresaut and Middle French sombresault, meaning ‘to jump over.’ The ‘somer’ part traces back to the Latin supra or super (meaning ‘over’ or ‘above’), which shifted phonetically through Old French into sobre– and was later corrupted or folk-etymologized into ‘somer.’”

I always thought of somersaults as adorable little floor rolls performed by children, but the Wikipedia article I checked out had several photos of gymnasts performing various forward and backward aerial “somersaults.” As I stared at the photos, trying to wrap my head around the connection between toddlers’ clumsy tumbles and gymnasts whirling through the air, it suddenly occurred to me that somewhere along the way I had apparently stopped monitoring thunderstorms and begun conducting an etymological investigation into gymnastics instead.

Which is exactly, my friends, how one goes from “Will the storm hit Milwaukee?” to “Why are there two Sault Ste. Maries?” to “What does sault mean anyway?” to “Wait—somersault?”

The weather forecast may have been predicting a storm, but I was the one who got swept away.

Vertical

The building in the center is Art Deco, but its classic heavenward stretch is nicely amplified by all the rest of those vertical lines, presenting an unexpectedly elegant, even stately composition. Photographed in downtown Milwaukee around 11:15 AM today, heading east on Wisconsin Avenue at 11th Street.

Photo of downtown Milwaukee, taken at street level, showing lots of vertical lines stretching upward