Create your legacy through work

We are still waiting on a cure for death, but until then building products may be the next best thing.

Fountain of immortality. Illustration by author.

The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has many famous quotes, but one from a Playboy interview in 1985 hits me harder than the rest: “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here?”

Many have interpreted this as a sort of call to action, that we should stop wasting our time and instead choose to live a life filled with purpose. And for 23-year-old me, that was certainly the case. These words from Jobs were a trigger that had me questioning my identity and purpose on this earth and steered me away from a medical career into one building products.

I’m sure many who work in product, design, engineering, or management have, at some point, experienced something similar.

The feeling such statements evoke makes us question if we are spending our time wisely and if anyone will care about the legacy, we leave behind. Hammering the point home, Jobs stated in his address to the graduating Stanford class in 2005: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

Humans seem to love a sense of looming fate; how else could five-star chrome extensions exist that remind us how long we have left to live?

Mortality is a great motivator but is also emotionally crippling — a constant gnawing of never “doing enough” or being “satisfied” enough with any outcome we achieve.

Even Jobs, despite his astonishing accomplishments, when asked about the motivation behind creating his biography, said: “I wanted my kids to know me … I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

If that's the feeling behind one of the most accomplished humans in history, what chance do the rest of us have? It seems it's very hard to be successful in one area without the feeling we are failing in another.

Why is our internal experience like this at all? Why is it not like other animals? A pigeon doesn’t sit around and agonise over what kind of pigeon they want to be this week. A Panda isn’t trying to be the…