A Visionary Living in the Material World

I am reading the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, so far an excellent read. People who knew Steve Jobs and worked closely with him all report that he had a weird ability to, in their words, “Warp reality,” with his words and enthusiasm. He had the power to call those things which are not, as though they were.

It didn’t always work, even with a faith in himself that would match Abraham’s faith in God, Jobs still experienced some world class failures. He was deservedly fired by the company he founded. Some of his creations such as the Lisa and NeXT computers were technological and financial disasters.

Yet he persevered. In the book Isaacson states, "Jobs quoted the hockey star Wayne Gretzky's maxim, "Skate where the puck's going, not where it's been." He continued to revolutionize consumer products with the high-performance iMac. He changed the music world forever with the iPod and iTunes. We still don’t know the end results his greatest creation, the iPhone, will have on the world, but a product that he said people didn’t know they needed because it didn’t exist, seems to be changing everything.

What about your calling makes you so excited that your words and enthusiasm would have the potential to “warp reality?” Where do you see the puck going? Where do those two lines intersect? When you find that point, when you craft that vision of the future, maybe, just maybe, you can change the world.