My favorite speech from Apple’s “Celebrating Steve” event last week was given by Jonathan Ive. He used personal stories to illustrate the qualities that made Jobs special, and he clearly spoke with emotion about the loss of his self-described best friend.
His remarks about the fragility of ideas were particularly good:
Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.“
And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.
And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
Here’s the full clip: