Eric Clapton (with Babyface) — “Change the World”
(from Clapton Chronicles: The Best of Eric Clapton
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Dreadful sorry about the severe dearth in Buzz posts of late; last week was a brutal one for me, what with work and whirlwind travel. I have nothing terribly noteworthy to add to the cavalcade of beautifully elegant tributes to the singular genius of Steve Jobs that have popped up just about everywhere online in the days since his tragic passing. But I do want to say this: it’s enough, I think, in this life to touch one person’s existence and, in however small a way, change it for the better. But, as anyone who has ever used any one of his company’s much-vaunted inventions can almost certainly attest, Mr. Jobs was scarcely satisfied with enough: as ABC News’ Bill Weir noted on Nightline in the immediate wake of the news of Jobs’ death, Steve was our Edison, our Disney, our Da Vinci. No cheap hyperbole, that; if anything, it’s an understatement. The term visionary gets thrown around with a too-casual ease these days, but there’s no question it applies here: with a staggering series of marvels of portable technology — each individual piece more impressive and game-changing than its predecessor — there’s hardly an acre of Earth whose inhabitants haven’t been fundamentally affected by Jobs’ unstoppable drive to change the way we connect with, contribute to, communicate with, and dream about the world around us. He was never one to rest on his laurels — clearly, he believed that a great thing can always be made better, and as such, he made perfectionism into an art, not a chore — but what I admired most about Steve was his profound embrace, in essentially equal measure, of style and substance: examine closely the shocking splashes of loud color in the original iMac, or the wispy (lack of) width of the MacBook Air, or the stunningly gorgeous squared design of the latest iPhone, and you understand at once how completely Jobs believed in the immutable power of a great presentation. He seemed to know in his soul that, in a world packed with ever-present strife and hardship, there remains a place, and a necessity, for the clean simplicity of beauty.
Stay hungry, and stay foolish is what Jobs wrote in his final tweet, and I can conceive of no more profoundly apt an epitaph. Steve was foolish enough to believe that technology could improve every facet of our lives, and he was hungry enough to prove it. Foolish enough to believe that one human mind thinking forever forward is enough to transform the world, and hungry enough to go the hell out there and do it, again and again and again.
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