The Unexpected Secret of How Steve Jobs Changed The World
The New Year is rapidly approaching – and if you're like most people, you might write some resolutions.
Below each resolution is ultimately a deeper question – “What do you want to focus on in your life? What do you want to leave in terms of a legacy for your life? What's your life all about?”
When I’m asking that question, I naturally think of someone like Steve Jobs.
How did someone like Steve Jobs leave such a massive impact on the world?
Why aren't most people leaving an impact like that?
I would argue that it's far beyond his innate capabilities. It's really about the place in which he lived, the way in which he lived mentally.
What do I mean by that?
A clue comes from a very strange book that Steve Jobs left for each guest at his funeral –?a book written by Paramahansa Yogananda, entitled “Autobiography of a Yogi”.
If you've ever opened this book (and I've cracked it open a few times), it's a very strange read. I find myself struggling to read it and wondering at times, "What the hell is this? Are any of these fantastical stories even remotely true? What kind of world does this guy live in where strange yogis can transform physical matter into flowers, levitate, live outside of time," etc.
THAT is what this book is about.
And whether or not you buy into the fantastical stories within –?I believe Steve Jobs had a very rare ability to live in two very different worlds, without denying the other.
On the one hand, he very much lived in the material world. He ran a massive publicly-traded company. He spent late nights dreaming up and working on new ideas. He was engaging with employees and investors and hiring and firing people and going to conferences, getting stuck in traffic, taking his kids to buy frozen yogurt –?all the hum-drum stuff of an executive career, and of a normal human life on planet earth.
Yet at the same time, Steve Jobs managed to live in a much vaster realm of perspective. If you're brutally intellectually honest with yourself, we also inhabit this same mystery. We find ourselves in waking consciousness, gazing upon a 93 billion light year sized universe, complete with incredible phenomena including black holes, supernovas, and strange invisible gravitational forces.
If you take an honest look at physics, we are stardust that has come together despite the laws of entropy to become sentient. Sentient stardust typed these words, and sentient stardust is reading them, on a screen built of the basic elements forged within stars.
Steve Jobs managed to keep one foot in the material world, strongly driving a really creative agenda, and one foot in this broader world, living in the universal question, "Why are we here? What does it all mean?"
He was a practical creator and a seeker.
Yet most of us are different. I believe the default tendency of the human mind is to pick one or the other. So if you're living in this universal/seeking mindset, you're kind of a woo-woo Northern Californian, "It's all energy, man, let's hug trees," whatever it might be.
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And the other extreme version of the other world is, "Let's go start like a quant arbitrage hedge fund, maximize our net worth, and forget these deeper questions. Life is just randomness or unfathomable so let’s essentially close the door to any broader existential question, make money and live unconsciously in the world of material form.”
Most of us choose one path or the other, but immensely rare are people like Steve Jobs who are brave enough and insightful enough to be able to walk through the world and hold both the material world as well as the broader question of existence.
I will leave you with one more question as we close, which is to similarly think about the sacred.
Each of us has some relationship with the sacred, whether it's believing in a higher power or universal intelligence or God or the intelligence of evolution. Or, you might completely deny that world and say, "That's all BS. Everything was just a kind of random creation of a process that has no deeper meaning behind it. Evolution, despite its beauty and complexity and ordering of chaos, is run by blind, pre-set heuristics and stochasticity.”
Whatever you believe – I would posit that it HAS to be all or none. Either EVERYTHING is sacred or NOTHING is sacred.
Most of us tend to think that we can compartmentalize sacred moments in cleanly defined pockets of the world –?where you're in church, see a beautiful sunset, an ayahuasca trip, the birth of a child.
Yet if we're honest, we can see pretty quickly through that delusion. If there is a sacred, it must be everywhere –?not in its own neatly divided swim lane.
We either live in a world where EVERYTHING – including the mundane, trite, and trivial.
Are you able to live as the meditation master Jack Kornfield so wonderfully puts it – "remembering your Buddha nature AND your social security number"?
Are you able to be cognizant of the bigger mystery, the incredible process that created your beating heart by no effort of your own –?all while living your ordinary human life, raising a family, running a business, getting life insurance policies, or whatever the day brings?
If you can hold both at the same time – without denying the other – you can get a glimpse of the door that Steve Jobs and very few others have walked through on this earth.
Oh –?and Happy New Year!
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Trying to walk through that door myself!
Founder BridgeLatam | Latitud Fellow (LF3) | Strategic Connector | LATAM-Europe Bridge Builder |
2 年Great Article Uri, and totally agree with you that Steve Jobs and others came with the same question and open to that possibility,