We knew Steve was sick. Sick enough to step down as the CEO of Apple. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we knew Steve could pass away at anytime, but remained optimistic.

I never thought I would be so upset about the passing of someone I’d never met. A person I didn’t know on any tangible level.

Yes, I found out through a text message sent to my iPhone and yes, my first reaction was to immediately fire up Safari on my iMac to verify the news. But my sadness had less to do with my preference for his products and more to do with fact that Steve Jobs was something of a hero of mine.

Steve’s work shaped my life. He famously said that Apple lives as the crossroads of the liberal arts and technology. My degrees—a bachelors in sociology and a masters in special education—are firmly in the liberal arts. I work in education—technology coordinator and teacher. Many of my core competencies in life and the skills that make me successful in my chose career were forged in front of a Macintosh IIvx at the tender age of 7. My job and my hobbies would not exist if it wasn’t for Steve.

Ultimately, however, it’s Steve’s legacy and his approach to life that had a lasting impact. Bill Gates was a programming whiz kid—a genius in every rite. Steve’s talents lied in his obsessive attention to detail, his intense care, his intolerance for anything but the best, his vision for the future, a charisma that could distort reality, and his focused execution. The typefaces, the textures, the pixels: Steve sweated every detail. He demanded the highest quality work from himself and everyone around him.

In remembrance, Steven Frank wrote:

He challenged us all — not just Apple, the whole industry — to make the world better. Not just make a better computer, or a better application, but leverage those tools to really make an impact, to make a difference in people’s lives.

Steve Jobs changed the world with passion and care. He inspired millions to do better. He inspired me to do better. He impacts the work I do every day as a teacher. Steve Jobs’s legacy, the adopted child of a working class family and a college dropout, compels me to inspire my students that armed with passion, care, hunger, and focus, they can change the world.