Steve’s pass­ing one year ago today was a sad and dif­fi­cult time for many of us. I hope that today every­one will reflect on his extra­or­di­nary life and the many ways he made the world a bet­ter place.

Post­ing this after the pre­vi­ous post: It’s worth men­tion­ing that in spite of Steve Jobs’ great accom­plish­ments at Apple it’s sad to know, from read­ing the Wal­ter Isaac­son biog­ra­phy, how much his fam­ily appar­ently suf­fered for it.

In light of that thought, I think this quote from Steve Jobs is appro­pri­ate. He was obvi­ously refer­ring to Apple when he said this at the 1997 Apple World Wide Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence but I know I’ve often spun it to help me remem­ber to say no to things that will cost me time with my wife and kids:

Peo­ple think focus means say­ing yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means say­ing no to the hun­dred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick care­fully. I’m actu­ally as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Inno­va­tion is say­ing no to 1,000 things.