THINK DIFFERENT

I didn't meet Steve Jobs. I never saw him speak in person. I never got an email back from [email protected] like those people on the forums.

But when I look back at my life, he's in almost every frame. Not as a hero on a poster, exactly. More like a guy standing just off to the side, handing me the next tool right when I needed it.

I never realized how much he was holding my hand along the way until I sat down to write this.

Washington Elementary

My first computer class was at Washington Elementary in Santa Barbara, and my teacher was Ms. Myers.

We learned on Macs. And Ms. Myers kept the latest Think Different ads in rotation, those black-and-white portraits of Einstein, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Jim Henson and the rest, with that little rainbow apple in the corner. Apple launched that campaign in 1997, and for a kid in a computer lab, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It told you the machine in front of you was for people who were going to make something.

Ms. Myers was also the first person to teach me that keyboard shortcuts matter. To this day, every time I press Command-Q, I hear her voice: "Command-Q to quit."

Every single time. Decades later. (If you've read my shortcuts posts, now you know where that came from.)

Then the iMacs showed up. Bondi Blue first, in 1998, then the five colors in early 1999: Blueberry, Lime, Tangerine, Strawberry and Grape. Translucent plastic, handles on top, no beige anywhere. If you went to school around then, you remember the first time you saw a row of them. Computers stopped looking like office equipment and started looking like candy. It made learning feel fun instead of like homework.

Computers have been part of my life ever since. And so has he.

The firsts

I grew up on PCs at home. So my first Mac of my own felt like crossing over to the side of the lab I'd always liked better.

That's where I learned to edit video in iMovie. Drag clips onto a timeline, add a title, drop in a song, export. It sounds simple now. At the time it felt like being handed a film studio. That one free app is the reason I fell into music videos and visual media, and it grew into a whole creative side of my life that I'm still building on today.

My first MP3 player wasn't even an iPod. It was a Diamond Rio. Respect to the Rio, it was early and it was cool. But then the iPod came out in 2001, "1,000 songs in your pocket," and it changed everything. The scroll wheel. The white earbuds you could spot from across the street. Music stopped being a stack of CDs and started being something you carried.

My first iPods were gifts from my parents. The first one I bought myself, with my own money, was the original iPod nano. It's a small thing, but anyone who's ever bought their first "real" thing with their own paycheck knows the feeling.

Launch day on La Cumbre

Then came the iPhone.

When Steve announced it in January 2007, AT&T was going to be the only place in the country to get one. So I did something that, looking back, tells you everything you need to know about me: I quit my office sales job and got a job at AT&T, just so I could touch that phone before anyone else I knew.

And I did.

On launch day, June 29, 2007, I was inside the AT&T store on La Cumbre, holding an iPhone in the window, while my friends were outside in line, having waited there overnight to buy one.

I still think about that. Them on the sidewalk, me behind the glass. Same excitement, different side of the counter. That was the first time I understood that I didn't just want to use this stuff. I wanted to be the person who helped everyone else use it.

Jailbreak season

Then came the jailbreak years.

If you weren't around for it: early iPhones were locked down tight. No App Store at first, limited customization, locked to one carrier. Jailbreaking was the hack that let you break out of Apple's rules and install whatever you wanted. Custom themes, apps Apple hadn't approved, tweaks that did things the phone wasn't supposed to do.

Steve famously hated it. And that's part of what made it so cool. Knowing how to jailbreak a phone made you the person everybody came to. People were constantly asking me to do theirs. Looking back, that was some of my earliest tech support: friends, friends of friends, a line of phones on the table and me in the middle of it.

The opening crew

Eventually I went to work for Apple itself, at a brand-new Apple Store, as part of the original opening crew.

Before the doors ever opened, we spent 60 days in training in classes at a local hotel the company rented out. Sixty days. Before we sold a single thing.

Those two months taught me more about customer service, about Apple, and about retail than anything before or since. How to greet people. How to listen before you talk. How to figure out what someone actually needs, which usually isn't what they walked in asking for. A lot of what I wrote about in steps of service and the fix is the easy part started in that hotel.

More money, easier life

After that, every major Apple release felt like a holiday. Not because I needed the newest thing (okay, sometimes because I needed the newest thing), but because every launch was another tool. Something that made my work faster, my creative stuff better or my day a little easier.

That's always been the deal for me. Better tools, better workflow. Better workflow, more time and more money. More money, easier life. If you've ever wondered where the Money Grinding mindset and the tech side of what I do meet, it's right there.

Even after

Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011.

Almost fifteen years later, his fingerprints are still on almost everything. The phone in your pocket. The way your laptop looks. The idea that a computer should be something regular people can pick up and understand without reading a manual. That a tool can be beautiful. That the people who use technology matter more than the people who build it.

That's not just my story. That's history.

But for me it's personal. It's a computer lab at Washington Elementary. It's a row of Blueberry and Tangerine iMacs. It's a nano I paid for myself, a phone in a window on La Cumbre, and sixty days in a hotel learning how to treat people right.

So, thank you, Steve. And thank you, Ms. Myers.

Command-Q.

— g