“You can be mentored by someone without ever meeting them.”
Kathy Ireland

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I have never learned so much so fast.  Steve Jobs died, and everyone seems to be writing about him, reflecting on his insanely great contributions.  I thought about linking to the best ones – but there are way, way, way too many of the best ones.

We all wish to be more like him.  We all wish he could mentor us.

But he would be a tough mentor.  He would be blunt, direct.  He would cut to the chase.  He would ask something along these lines:  “What are you supposed to be doing?”  Then, if we weren’t doing that really, really well, he would say, “Then why the f___ aren’t you doing that?”

And at the end of the day, we would either hate him, and abandon the mentoring relationship – or we would get a lot, lot better at what we do, and know that he gave us the push to do exactly that.

And it would all start with astonishing clarity about what it is we are supposed to do.

I just wrote that there are way too many great tributes and lessons and stories and quotes to link to.  It really has been a business education, with a blinding avalanche of content, about this one man and his influence.  (And, by the way, after my first few years on a typewriter {remember those} – I have never typed a word on anything but a Mac product in my home or office.  I think I’m on my 7^th Mac {now iMac}, and, yes, I have an iPhone and an iPad).  But this tribute seems especially great.  So here is an excerpt from Here’s To The Crazy One by MG Siegler from TechCrunch:

In many ways, it’s perfect that the video below surfaced again just after Jobs’ passing. It’s the original Apple “Think Different” commercial. In it, images of transformative people throughout the 20th century are shown as a narrator toasts to them for changing the world. In the versions that aired on TV, the narrator is Richard Dreyfuss. But in the version below, the narrator is Steve Jobs.

The toast reads as follows:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Perhaps he didn’t know it in 1997 when he recorded this, but that is absolutely Steve Jobs describing himself. He was crazy enough to think he could change the world. And he did.

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(In the video:  Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr, Richard Branson, John Lennon, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Maria Callas, Ted Turner. Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso)