As you know, America lost two great historic figures last week; Fred Shuttlesworth and Steve Jobs. Both men profoundly changed our nation.  I was a fan of Apple products for almost twenty years almost exclusively before it was cool to use their platform of computers. Many people have compared Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison, and I think they are exactly right.  Among other things, Apple has forever changed how we view and treat data, music, movies and computing.   Yet, for every great inventor there are often lots of failures.   Unfortunately, Jobs' greatest failure was unnecessary and perhaps the only one that he never learned from and then built upon.

Steve Jobs was known for being very private about his life, even the fact that he was adopted into the Jobs family, as the child of a single birth mother was not widely known until recently.  In his last interview with his biographer, the author was taken aback by how personal Jobs became, even giving him pictures of his adoptive family for the book.  When asked why he finally showed this personal side, Jobs said, "I want my kids to know me."  (Implying that they would need to read the biography to learn about their dad.)

Jobs changed how millions of people communicate every day. He made billions, which gave him what so many Americans worship and desire, but at the end of the day, he needed an author to reach his own children on his behalf.