Joyce McMillan: Inspiring us to invest in creativity

THERE’S always a brief moment, when a great man or woman dies, when the sheer sense of loss tempts us to exaggerate the meaning of their lives. In the case of Steve Jobs, though – founder of Apple and Pixar, and the man behind the most successful series of product designs in the history of electronic communications – it is difficult to avoid the feeling that with his death, earlier this week, the world lost a creative force of unique significance.

For myself, as just one example, I am not a computer enthusiast of any sort, or a rapid adopter of new technologies. Yet I look around my flat, and see two laptops and a brilliantly slim iPhone, now the absolutely vital tools of my life as a writer and communicator; all created, processed and refined in Steve Jobs’s elegant powerhouse of a mind, so as to exert a decisive influence on product development not only within his Apple Macintosh empire, but across the whole industry.

And it is strange to think that I share this experience not just with millions of others, but literally with billions, across the planet; in China alone, 35 million people registered messages of grief and sympathy, within minutes of the announcement of Jobs’s death.

Steve Jobs, in other words, is one of the iconic figures of our time, a wealth creator par excellence, who generated markets where none knew that they might exist, and who devised objects so beautiful, so useful and so innovative that they began to take our civilisation in whole new directions. His life’s work was a prime example of the kind of inspired, creative and unpredictable thought our species will need time and again, over the coming decades, if we are to have a chance of surviving the planet’s looming resource and environmental crises.

We therefore owe it to ourselves, at this moment, to listen again to his own account of his life, and to try – now that we can see that life as a whole – to absorb the lessons Jobs himself drew from it.

And what we see, in the story of Steve Jobs, is a man who in many ways was the absolute antithesis of a conventional modern business leader; as his trademark black-sweater outfit proclaimed, he was not a “suit”, but a creative leader, doing the work he loved.

In his famous commencement address to the students of Stanford University, back in 2005, he told three stories, and the second and third were about the value of failure and death, as forces for re-evaluation, for renewal, and for sharpening our sense of urgency in living our short lives as well as possible; in his embrace of both experiences, Jobs defied the shallow and arrogant culture of most modern business practice, with its contempt for human weakness, and its aggressive bottom-line materialism.

Even more telling than either of these, though, was Jobs’s first story, about his early relationship with the formal education system. Adopted by a working-class couple who promised his unmarried mother that he would have a college education, Jobs in fact dropped out of his course after a year, not wanting his parents to squander their life savings on something whose value was unclear to him; and began to attend some classes purely for pleasure.

At that time, he could not foresee the significance of these experiences, which involved a detailed class in calligraphy – “beautiful, historical, artistically subtle”; but later, they became central to the design success of Apple computers, so strongly did they help Jobs to develop the parts of his mind that went beyond science, into the realms of pleasure, beauty and joy.

And his message to the Stanford students, based on this experience, was clear; that the way to a truly creative future lies in doing the work you love, not in doing what the system tells you is sensible or profitable; and at the very least, at this moment of his death, we should pay him the respect of considering what his words would mean, if we were to take them seriously now.

For they would mean, to begin with, a huge reinvestment in our creative economy, in our means of reflecting and reimagining our world. We would not, for example, be sacking 2,000 people from the BBC, many of them creative workers, in order to save a sum barely sufficient to pay the bonuses of a dozen top bankers. They would mean an end to excessive rewards for a suit-wearing, box-ticking management class, dedicated to a joyless culture of pre-set targets and obsessive oversight that has become the enemy of creativity and focus, in both the public and private sectors.

And above all, they would mean a revolution in education, not least at tertiary level; an end to the doomed effort to respond to every vague and fleeting demand of the labour market, a rethink of the ill-advised “commercialisation” of the sector, and a return to the idea of the university as a wellspring of knowledge about the finest achievements of humankind in science, philosophy and the arts – not so much a bestower of “qualifications”, as a source of wisdom, and of the kind of cultural richness and deep knowledge that nourishes creative inspiration, over a lifetime.

This weekend, in other words, many fine tributes will be made to Steve Jobs, some of them by those who see his life and work as a simple vindication of our entire economic system. Listen to Jobs’s words, though, and consider how our culture has changed, in the generation since he was growing up in California. And then ask yourself whether we are really doing what is needed, to nurture a new generation of world-transforming creative leaders; or whether we are just talking the talk of creativity, while the vast majority of young people are bullied, tested, trained and managed into conformity with the needs of a system that is failing, and that increasingly lacks the courage or wisdom to invest in the gorgeous and unpredictable creative energy that is the stuff of renewal and rebirth, and that Steve Jobs now leaves us, as his wake-up call, his legacy, and his gift.