Posted by Graham Stinson

It's been a couple weeks since Steve Jobs died, and that time has been heady for me. As a designer, I can't deny the impact that Steve Jobs has had on my life, my work, and my surroundings, and I know most of us can say the same. Here is a man who changed the world, who derailed the direction that technology was going and made it go somewhere different. He challenged us to think different about pretty much everything, long before the value of that creativity and innovation was recognized by all.

Why? Because Steve Jobs was all about creating delight for the person who used his products.

Delight is difficult. People are fickle yet strangely tenacious. They will dig in their heels and hold on to whatever is in their hands until you show them something so different, so amazing, that they suddenly realize that what they had wasn't worth holding on to.

I heard an interview with a woman who worked with Jobs in the late 80s: she said he had a gift for simplifying the complex. I remember people I've worked with who had that gift, and how that gift had to manifest itself in what seemed at times a maniacal pursuit of a very, very specific vision and direction, to the exclusion of every other possibility. It made them difficult to work with until I realized that they were right—and admirable—and the results spoke for themselves. Here's why: we all tend to gravitate toward chaos. It's in our nature. And in order to cut away the unnecessary, to make complex things not only usable but delightful, we have to fight hard against our nature, and sometimes prune away things we're attached to.

Steve's reality distortion field was well known, too. He was able to motivate people to do things that seemed crazy, but were important. The way things are sometimes blinds us to the way things should be. In order to really innovate, to create things that not only don't exist but are a departure from what does exist, we must have a strong vision that flies in the face of the logical next step. Because delight comes from the unexpected, it’s about solving problems that people don’t even know they have -- and creating ways to do things that most people never imagined.

But I think the reason we were all so deeply impacted by the life and death of Steve Jobs comes down to his persistence. Despite a painful betrayal and boardroom coup, despite multiple health setbacks, he held tight to his passion and didn't let it go. When he left Apple, he started NeXT. He invested personally to an amazing degree in Pixar. And when Apple couldn't have been in much worse shape, he stepped in and changed everything. Again. It’s clear that there was nothing disingenuous about Steve Jobs' pursuit of delight, and his firm belief that delight is where the future is. He not only drank his own Kool-Aid, he made sure he had whipped up a batch big enough for all of us.

It's an amazing time to be building software for the Church, and I thank God for using people like Steve Jobs.