The best way to understand a person is to listen to that person directly, and the best way to

understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life. His words

in speeches, interviews, and emails offer a window into how he thought, and he was an exquisite

thinker. Much of what's in these pages reflects guiding themes of Steve's life,

his sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the arts and technology,

his unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself,

his tenacity in pursuit of assembling and leading great teams,

and perhaps above all, his insights into what it meant to be human. Steve once told a group of students, you appear,

have a chance to blaze in the sky, and then you disappear. He gave an extraordinary amount

of thought to how best to use our fleeting time.

He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence,

animated by the thought that he and that any of us might elevate or expedite human progress.

It is hard to see what is already there, to gain a clear view.

Steve's gift was greater still.

He saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there.

His mind was never a captive of reality.

Quite the contrary, he imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it.

His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic

sense of possibility.

In these pages, Steve drafts and refines.

He stumbles, grows, and changes.

But always, always, he retains that sense of possibility.

...