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.”

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.