This is not one of those misplaced quotes that weren’t actually said by some celebrity, but have been attributed to them to give it credibility.

You can watch right here the 1 minute video of Steve Jobs sharing his insight.

Such a short clip, it almost seems trivial.

How profound can a quote, said before I was even born, bear any significance?

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you, and you can change it — you can influence it, you can build things your own things that other people can use. The minute you understand that if you push in, something will pop out the other side, you can change it, you can mold it — that’s maybe the most important thing.

It’s simple, really.

A lot of people admire Steve Jobs and the empire that is Apple Inc, and I think this particular piece is so critically important to understanding how Jobs did what he did best, which was change the world.

You don’t need permission.

Whatever it is you want to do in life (almost), the primary barrier to achieving it is probably yourself.

Yes — an African child who is starving is probably more limited by outside factors. I’m addressing the vast majority of people in the western world, not those who truly don’t have opportunities given to them by virtue of simply existing in highly developed societies.

What Jobs said 22 years ago was highly relevant then, but today, it’s simply exponentially easier to actually influence the world.

Want to build stuff? You don’t need to be an engineer or a mechanic, you just have to go on the internet and look at the millions of other people who are building tons of amazing stuff and follow in their footsteps.

Want to design a product? You don’t need to have a fancy art degree, you just have to go on the internet and find the software you need, or even just start sketching by hand.

Want to program a cool app? You don’t need to go to college and study software engineering — you just need to find a computer or even a phone and start reading, watching, experimenting and learning.

Software is honestly one of the best examples — there are probably more self-taught software developers than formally trained software developers, and I think the reason is simple:

Access.

The internet is the ultimate access point for software development. If you’re on the internet, you already have everything else you need to learn to build software. This has led to a few converging events that are extremely important for the modern world.

First is the absolute explosion over the last few decades in revenue generated by software companies, which puts a high demand on software skills. As Marc Andreesen said: “Software is eating the world” as everything is coming to rely on it.

Secondly, the phenomenon that is open source. Almost all software relies to some degree or another on shared knowledge and code under various open source conditions.

This is so, so crucial, again, because it gives the ultimate form of access for others to stand on the shoulders of those who built it and make progress for everyone.

Consequently, software startups can be started for practically no money, since the underlying frameworks that are freely available are so powerful that even a single programmer can build valuable products with relatively little effort compared to when software first became a thing.

The really interesting thing, however, is how this relates to the rest of the world.

Sure, software, being a relatively recent industry compared to say manufacturing, is obviously going to grow faster since it’s less mature.

But many of the aspects that allowed software to explode in the manner it has could probably be applied to hardware as well.

We’re already seeing it, especially with the RepRap project and the dawn of serious open source hardware. Companies like Prusa Research publish everything you need to build or modify their product and still have a 250 million dollar valuation.

Imagine a world where hardware is as accessible as software.

People who want to learn about hardware engineering could go online and find open designs for everything from motors to valves to ball bearings.

They could find and contribute to these open projects and designs, much like software: you could build on existing designs to improve them, or fork the project if you need to build an alternate version of something for your project.

You could easily start new projects with all the knowledge available to you, as well.

Already, digital fabrication tools like 3D printers are widely available as open source projects, allowing anyone to gain extensive insight into how they operate, how to build them, which parts are needed and so on.

This has led to very low prices given the extreme transparency.

Imagine if this happened to… everything.

3D printers aren’t just important because they allow anyone to produce parts on their desktops — they’re important because they show a different way to work with engineering that isn’t built on “proprietary” technology and unnecessary competition that just puts up barriers to entry and slows everyone down.

Back to the Steve Jobs quote. We need to realize that the way things are isn’t the way they have to be.

While the quote is applicable in many places, the particular area of transparency and openness is a perfect example of where I think it would have a massive impact.

Anyone can create alternatives to what exists, and this is exactly what I think we need to do if we want to bring the software revolution to all other aspects of our life as well.

Transparency and access provides so much value that it’s incredible. Once that becomes apparent, wave goodbye to the way things are and embrace an incredible revolution in how physical things are developed, built and used that will give the software revolution a run for it’s money in terms of impact on the world.