In the late 90s when Steve Jobs returned to Apple he helped spearhead a massive and very successful advertising campaign with the slogan "Think different" and commercials that featured historical footage of various famous figures, as though Picasso or Gandhi were endorsing Apple. The ad also featured narration from Richard Dreyfuss that begins "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels..." This little speech must have made quite an impression on people, evidenced by the fact that twenty-five years later you can buy placards on Esty of the quote in full, often misattributed to Jobs himself (a guy at the marketing agency wrote it).

At the end of the speech, the notion of the "crazy ones" is turned around: "while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." Now that a quarter century has passed I want to raise my hand like I'm in school and say this makes no sense. One can easily see there are plenty of people "crazy enough" to think they can change the world who end up not changing the world one bit, and there are also a lot of people who are not "crazy enough" to think they can change the world but do end up changing it, sometimes profoundly, simply by circumstance.

Also, what is meant by "changing the world," etc. This is basically marketing agency pseudo-inspirational pabulum, but of a kind that sounds so powerful and was disseminated so widely that it seems like hundreds? thousands? of people have this on their dorm room walls or in their co-working spaces. And perhaps this was a milestone on the way to today's notion of the "crazy," exceptional, non-rule-bound tech founder person who nobody is supposed to question. The fact that we have so many of those today might be one way Jobs really did change the world.

Random thought.