The most influential person in your life

I saw a reddit post today about what single person changed your life. Most people's answers are for the better. Mine's different.

Hindsight is a bitch. One day, you may find yourself wondering how you got to a certain point in your life. You wonder where things went wrong, and if your mind is willing, it wanders back to the moments in time where your life started down some path. My mind does a wonderful thing when it gets there, and it likes to explore all the options I didn't take, even the ones I didn't know I had. And then it stretches itself across the chaos of time and images what could have been. Basically, my mind is an asshole.

A good amount of time, I think back to the summer before college when I started dating a girl. My mind thought: "Well, why not? We'll see where this goes." Like I said, he's an asshole. I had no idea that words could be so powerful until a couple years later. By then, the words had become "I should stay with her, she still loves me." They became "I owe this to her." They became "We can make this work."

I entered into a relationship with the idea that I would see where it took me. Eventually I fell in love with the girl, thinking that she was all I needed. There was a distance between us (three hours by train, but we made it work for a time). Time passes, and hindsight kicks in like the bitch it is. I realize that we aren't the same people. That's ok, people grow together. However, I realize that I've grown apart, and she has grown into something that wasn't the girl I fell in love with. But she still loved me. The words I told myself convinced me that we should try to make it work for a time. And I did try. And I failed, because it seemed like I was the only one. I would ask for things to change, and the would. For a time. A couple weeks things would revert back to the way they were.

So I did reprehensible things. I lied, I cheated, I told her the distance was the reason. I told the truth: she was too dependent on me, she was suffocating my life from hundreds of miles away, and that I want to try anymore. And I hurt someone very deeply.

Why did I act so shitty? It was a good idea at the time. That good idea was me trying to keep me happy. Fortunately, that decision was a good one. But the consequences and reasons were shitty.

Why am I telling you this? It wasn't the girl that was the person who changed my life. I was. Every single time my life has gone down the shitter, it was because of myself. Every time, I picked myself back up. There was no one else. Most of the people I know are too centered on their own lives to even stop to worry about mine. I think the most profound lessons aren't the ones other people teach you. They are the ones you teach yourself. You can have inspirations in people, and they can help a great deal. Don't diminish your own contributions to your own life. Own up to your successes as well as your failures. The whole picture is so much prettier.

Dear Steve,

Hi, my name is Andrew. I never knew you. In fact, I never actually owned one of your products. In fact, I hated them. I relished the fact that I could hate them. I hated the fact that you turned something so mediocre into the most trendy thing on this planet. I hated the fact that your products created a group of elitist assholes who followed you like a cult. I laughed very hard when you told people they were holding the iPhone 4 wrong, mostly at your expense.

These aren't things I would have admitted to you...far from it. If we had met, and discussed your company's policies, I would have said I disagreed with them. I would have given you my very well thought out reasons why. I'm sure you would have corrected me on a few points. You did, after all, help pave the way for new technologies, as everyone has admitted. You brought to the mainstream something that we nerds were hoarding all to ourselves. What you tried to do was right. Some of your execution was a little poor. I like to believe that your heart was in the right place.

All this though...this isn't really my point. The point I want to make is about the iMac and OSX. The original OSX. You see, Steve, you're the reason I'm a computer programmer. And because of that, I've never been truly able to hate you.

When I was in high school my freshman year, my school had purchased a whole new computer lab full of iMacs. These were the first version that still looked like old eMacs, only in all white. Most people don't realize this, but these machines were the first to pave the way for an entire decade of design for apple products. They didn't quite have the touch screen buttons on the monitor. That was a couple years away. But they had OSX. And OSX was built like unix. It had a unix style command line. And this, in my first computer science class, was how I was introduced to programming.

I would love to say that I was introduced to it through linux, as some of my colleagues can claim. I wasn't. I originally took that class because I liked video games. I was very surprised to learn how hard programming was. It took a level of abstract though. However, the one thing that I understood very quickly was the idea of compiling on a command line. OSX did NOT make it easy. In fact, it was just as hard as linux. I had trouble with the basics of programming then. But I never had trouble with my efforts trying to make it work. That was the first time I had to admit that Apple did something better than Microsoft.

Over the years, it has been a struggle for me to do determine which operating system is the best. It took me a while to realize the correct answer: there isn't one (and it sure as hell isn't Solaris). The real answer is that there isn't a best. Each one is catered to something different. And you catered yours to something special, and you did it well.

I like to tell a story about how I got into computers. I fixed my parents computer when I wasn't supposed to, and my mom grounded me for it. It's true. And that is what first got me into computers. However, because of your company, Steve, I became interested in programming. And that shaped the rest of my life. I'm a software developer now. I work for a very successful investment bank that hired me for my programming abilities. I leverage them every day (though I will never leverage it for your stuff. I would have loved to ask you what the hell your developers were thinking when they though objective C was a good idea for the iPhone). And I owe a small bit of that to you.

I'm sure in a few days I'll go back to hating your company for it's pioneering in the terribleness of DRM, privacy violations, and the like. But I still have to recognize the part you have played in my life, even though I abhorred touching anything your company produced.

So thank you, Steve Jobs. I wouldn't be here today without you, in as much as you have helped. I would like to think you passed on satisfied with your work on this Earth. I just hope the rest of us can say that we did even a sliver as much. God speed.

Well then

Apparently, my company blocks gmail, but not my google sign in to my blog. That's odd. I promise a post tonight.