Who's That Girl?

I got a few boxes of my stuff down from my mums loft last weekend. I still have so much stuff (crap) up there that I have stored over the years and I thought it was time to start transferring it now that I’ve got a loft of my own.

The boxes have sat untouched for ten years. Countless folders stuffed full of letters from friends and family, my University coursework (a concrete reminder that I was clever once, before the fug of motherhood and years of pickling my brain in alcohol set in), a programme from a Chippendales show I went to (seriously, the Chippendales???!!!), Reading Festival programmes, the obligatory Boyfriends Box, an envelope of things from my very early childhood including a home typed by me certificate of adoption for my Cabbage Patch Kid (all my friends CPK’s came with a certificate, mine didn’t which is highly suspicious, maybe my CPK was illegitimate?), random collections of giraffes and Lion King memorabilia, and a huge scrap book of all my Kylie and Jason clippings. Yes I know, how sad.

Looking through the boxes has been a very strange and fascinating journey. All this stuff doesn’t even feel like it belongs to me. The owner is familiar, maybe someone I might have met before but can’t quite place.

The truth is I’m not that person anymore, I don’t feel like I ever was. It makes me squirm to think of some of the things I did and said, particularly in my terror years age 13-21 (when I thankfully met the man and everything seemed to slot into place). Who was that provocative, loud vixen in platform trainers (still can’t get over that one, I blame the Spice Girls) who used to occupy my body?

I now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that it wasn’t me at all. She was just a child trying to make sense of the world, work out who she was, someone actually very self conscious and anxious, not that you would have known it at the time. I was trying on different coats for size until I found one that fits. And I think that’s what growing up is, we’re all trying on different coats until we find one that fits us perfectly and we can become comfortable in our own skin.

It’s a tricky business, piecing together which parts actually were me, and which were trial runs. Chippendales concert: not me, Reading Festival programmes: me, Uni coursework: me (thankfully), random collections: not me, typing up my own certificate of adoption for my Cabbage Patch Kid: erm, well that does sound like something I would do.

So now that I’ve reacquainted myself with this person what do I do now? Do I keep her or throw her away?

When I told big bro yesterday that I had found my Uni coursework, he said “My coursework made no sense to me, I binned it and kept the text books.” My text books were the first thing to go, I can’t imagine throwing my work away, it really is a part of me.

We all have to decide what, if any, reminders of our old selves we want to hang on to. The hardcore clutter experts say you should keep nothing that isn’t highly useful, highly practical or seriously sentimental. I don’t consider myself particularly sentimental and a lot of this stuff just makes me cringe. But despite the fact that most of it represents a person that I don’t even recognise, I won’t throw her away. I’ll put her back in my loft along with the other ill-fitting discarded coats from the years. To be got out and remembered but never worn again.

This Is What The Fuss Is Really About

Since October 5^th all I seem to hear and see everywhere is Steve Jobs. He keeps cropping up in the news, blogs (!) and internet forums. All I knew about him was he had something to do with Apple and he died. What was all the fuss about? I didn’t understand why his death seemed almost as newsworthy as Princess Di’s.

Last night while waiting for the man to watch the Grand Prix so I could catch up on X Factor, I was aimlessly surfing, and again Steve Jobs kept cropping up. He must have been someone pretty important. Clearly I should know more about him.

Steve Jobs was adopted into a working class family and had a fairly normal upbringing. He dropped out of University after one semester, fearing that he was draining his family’s finances, returning Coke bottles to make up his food money and eating at a local charity food scheme.

From these humble beginnings, Jobs carved out a hugely influential and successful career in the computer industry, founding Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, then being fired and branching out into graphics, by purchasing Pixar which went on to create highly successful animated films with Disney.

Jobs then returned to Apple after his computer company NeXT was bought by Apple. They went on to create the iPod, iPhone and iPad. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Regardless of whether or not Jobs invented these products (or whether it was some faceless employee of Apple) no one can deny the impact Steve Jobs had on our daily life. I don’t use Apple products, but you can’t exactly miss them. That’s pretty impressive for a company created in his parents garage.

But I don’t think it’s so much the creation of these (some might say life changing) products that has made the life of Steve Jobs such a newsworthy story. The truth is, he is the perfect example of someone who just wouldn’t give up. He had a dream, a pretty big one, and he didn’t let hiccoughs along the way stop him from getting things done. For me, a self confessed self help addict, who has read countless books about how success is a state of mind, it’s more about how you think than what you do, Steve Jobs is the perfect antithesis of all that. Yes he dreamed, yes he thought, but he didn’t let that thinking get in the way of actually doing.

So many of us say we can’t do this until we have got that, waiting for that moment in the future when everything falls into place and we can start doing things. We think that one day we will be thin, be rich, have a qualification, have more time, but what if we never do? What a waste of a life sitting around waiting to be happy. Steve Jobs didn’t let a lack of qualifications or money stop him from founding Apple, he just got on with it. I firmly believe that most of the things that we’re waiting for are probably just excuses for being too scared or not believing in ourselves.

Too many of us worry about what people think of us, what people might say. Steve Jobs did not listen to people who thought he couldn’t do it. Even when he was fired from the very company he created. He just quietly went about proving them wrong. He didn’t listen when people said the world had PC’s they didn’t need another computer system. He had the courage to believe he knew what people needed and wanted before they knew themselves. He fully and unquestionably believed in himself, and this to me, is what makes him so inspiring.

Steve Jobs isn’t the only influential entrepreneur to die at a young age, or the only successful person to come from an unspectacular background, but he was a pretty fascinating person who leaves behind a very inspiring legacy.

From someone who I had barely heard of, to someone who has impacted my thinking, and my doing, in less than a week. Fair play to you, Steve Jobs.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech 2005