There’s a lot that could be said about Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple’s CEO, but this article brings up a point I think is relevant to us: Steve Jobs: America’s Greatest Failure.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.

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Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

If I could go back in time and pick one of the changes that’s happened since I started here to not happen, I think it would be our loss of willingness to take risks. If you’re not free to fail, you’re not really free, and your chances of success are very small.