From my iPhone to yours.

A couple of years ago, my sister, Burton, and I were talking about my debut dress.

Yes, I was a debutante...more on that, later. Maybe.

But our conversation started with Burton saying something like this-

-Yea, you got a new dress and I had to wear my old prom dress...
-But you got a new dress for the winter presentation, and I had to wear that one...
-Whatever, you get everything you want in life.
-What? Burton, you have a beautiful home and a husband who lov--
-YOU HAVE AN iPHONE!

I was a senior at Furman when the first iPhone was revealed. We watched it live in my marketing class. At that moment, I fell in love with Apple.

Later that year I was lucky enough to be able to take a course in digital photography in a new digital lab which housed 8 brand new iMacs. My love grew deeper...

It was a couple of years before I could afford my own iPhone...and I'm still saving up for my iMac.

(Burton has her iPhone now, too. And she, of course, is not as shallow as that exchange makes her sound. She's not shallow at all, she's hilarious.)

But seriously...as an artist, an entrepreneur, a blogger, a small business owner, an Angry Birds Master, and a girl who would seriously lose a lot of arguments without Google in her pocket...I am truly saddened by what the world has lost.

Steve Jobs, the visionary behind Apple, died today. He was 56.

I can't help but think about where he might have taken us in the next 20 years.

In this article that I read about Steve, they include a quote from a commencement speech that he gave in 2005. In it, he encouraged the students not to waste their time living somebody else's life...not to allow other people's opinions to drown out their inner voice...

"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

I don't know yet what I truly want to become. But I do know that I will get there one day.

And as an artist, an entrepreneur, a blogger, a small business owner, an Angry Birds Master, and a girl who would seriously lose a lot of arguments without Google in her pocket...I know that in a lot of ways, I have Steve Jobs to thank for that.