After the death of Steve Jobs, many people have shared anecdotes about him.  It’s hard to pick a favorite, but “Hi. It’s Steve” from Aaron Sorkin is a great one.  It’s not that Jobs tried to convince Sorkin to write a Pixar movie.  It’s this:

The second-to-last call I got from Steve came the day a television series of mine was canceled. “I just want to make sure you’re not discouraged,” he said. Why would an almost stranger take even 60 seconds out of his day to make that call? It had to have been because he was an awfully nice man. And that he knew what it felt like to blow it on a big stage.

I like this story because I think that it encapsulates one reason that Jobs was successful: he saw things that he should do, and he did them.  He didn’t equivocate about whether he should do them, he just went out and did them.  Some were big, some were small.  But the gist is the same: he took action instead of just sitting around thinking “I should do that”.  In this case, the action that he took was to reach out to someone he liked (but didn’t know very well) when they’d experienced something discouraging.

This anecdote keeps on coming back to me.  It makes me do things instead of just thinking about doing them, including writing this blog post.