Death is the most wonderful invention of life : Steve Jobs' interview of 1985

Long before Steve Jobs gave his celebrated 2005 Stanford commencement address — the one where he spoke about death as "life's change agent" — he had already articulated a striking version of the same idea in a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine, given when he was just 29 years old.

"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent," Jobs said in that interview. "Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it."

The 1985 interview came just before Jobs was pushed out of Apple — a humiliation that would, by his own later account, prove essential to everything that followed. But even then, the quality of his thinking about time, mortality, and purpose was evident.

In the 2005 Stanford address, Jobs expanded these ideas more fully. He described how, at 17, he had read a quote that struck him: "If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." He said he'd looked in the mirror every morning and asked himself whether, if this were his last day, he would want to do what he was about to do. "Whenever the answer has been 'no' for too many days in a row," he said, "I know I need to change something."

His most striking formulation: "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 and died in October 2011. The ideas he expressed about mortality — perhaps easier to articulate than to fully internalize — proved, in his case, to have been lived as much as stated.