A creative visionary who changed the world and left a gigantic heritage behind. Even now that he is physically gone, we, freelancers can still learn from him…

1. Letting go and taking a leap of faith

It is necessary to let go of the old me and in many cases of old fears which won’t let us take off into that leap of faith in what we do.

After many travels and a lifestyle that some would define as Bohemian, Steve had an enlightening encounter with himself and decided to sell his Volkswagen bus to later locked himself in his garage alongside with Wozniak to give birth to his first creation that would forever change the computer world: Apple I, world’s first personal computer.

As creative professionals, we must lock ourselves in the same way to unleash our creative powers and pour them onto our personal projects, for we can not only find inner selves in them, but also find the doors to many great opportunities that otherwise we wouldn’t even think of.

In order to do that, we must have faith in our own work, show it proudly to the world and let go of any excuse which prevents us from doing it so.

2.  Putting your eggs into different baskets

In our professional field, we’ve seen time and again how specializing can be quite rewarding. Why not? It’s a good move in this industry. But we shouldn’t oversee the fact that before getting there, it is necessary and above all, healthy, trying a bit of everything. With this I’m not saying that it pays well off being a bag of tricks, but it’s just worth it putting your golden eggs into different baskets in order to find “our thing” and finally find that niche, technique or discipline that in the long term will become our especiality. This requires us to step away a little so that we can see the big picture.

When Jobs stepped away from Apple and left his CEO position, he adventured into a new enterprise that he called NeXT Inc. a software company which by the way didn’t see much success. Nevertheless, this “failure” didn’t represent much of a problem to Steve as he had invested some golden eggs in the purchase of a small animation company.  What company? Pixar.  How many eggs? $50 million. Whose basket? George Lucas‘.

The result: $4 billion generated by projects such as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.  Not bad, eh?

Some time later, along came other baskets like Disney’s for example, where Jobs ended up being its biggest shareholder.

3. Reinventing yourself and setting the trend

When Steve returned to Apple, he reinvented computers and once again revolutionised the world of computers with his fresh new approach and stylish design. It was iMac which brought success to Apple’s doorstep again, and the whole world was captivated with the delightful industrial design put to work.

Remember the time when even kitchen blenders were made with that transparent colourful plastic, just like the iMac?

And that became Mac’s trend, reinventing and redesigning itself every so many moons until it evolved into what it is today.  Poor copycats out there couldn’t keep up with Apple’s pace. And most likely, the iMac I’m using to write this post will probably change radically in a not so distant future.

Reinventing ourselves demands a continuous work of self-critique, research and self-assessment in order to differentiate us primarily from ourselves and as a consequence from others. Why is this necessary?  It’s necessary to be better, to evolve and grow, not for others but for us as individuals and as professionals. In a world of non-stop noise, uniqueness can come to be our greatest strength.  After all, being copied is way better that being a copycat. Right?

4. Never stop innovating

But things don’t end there, reinventing and innovating is a way of life, and a constant growth work that must not ever stop.

iMac wasn’t enough for Jobs, innovation and evolution came along with iPod, which set the trend on music players and format. It’s continuous evolution made it impossible for competition to react.

Then came the iPhone, to set the new standard on what mobile smart phones should be like, with its multiple functionality and integration with iTunes and of course, countless apps available.

Was it enough? Nope.  Some time later, the world saw the birth of iPad, that came to stay and establish a new path in tablets and wireless devices. No need to describe what it is and does, right?

So what do we learn from all this?  We must set ourselves a goal:  to engage in a never ending quest to seek new ideas, techniques, approaches, whether we are graphic or web designers, photographers, developers, communicators or consultants. As long as there are things that have never been done, there will be room for innovation and setting the next trends.

Of course there were more achievements and innovations in Steve’s story, but for this post I figured this few examples could do just fine.

The greatest teaching Steve Jobs has left us is not having fears, but having instead and insatiable desire to change the world.