Category Archives: Observations

Jul 09

Steve Jobs and success

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There’s a post wandering round the internet and social media that’s purportedly from Steve Jobs.

It isn’t.

I won’t bother to reprint the whole thing, but in amongst its off the shelf self help words about the need to “Treasure Love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends” and “Love can travel a thousand miles. Life has no limit. Go where you want to go. Reach the height you want to reach. It is all in your heart and in your hands” lies a deep dark poison.

Before I start, I don’t know Steve Jobs. Never met the guy. I have a lot of respect for his speech to the University in Stanford which contains some real insights into modern life, business and the pursuit of a dream.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

That’s the sort of vision that I’d like Steve to be remembered for.

I have a lot of respect for his achievement. Although I don’t own any Apple technology. Because I don’t like it much. So I’m not a huge fan of Apple.

But I am a huge fan of people following their dreams. And Steve did. And this latest post, which seems to indicate that Steve rejected what he achieved in life, rings false to me, and with it trickles a steady stream of new age poison into our lives and our beliefs.

Steve was a man with a vision. Not a vision to be wealthy, as such, but a vision to create. To create a working personal computer. To create a computing world that was elegant and beautiful. To create a computing world where things worked together. To create devices that were intuitive, effective, efficient and enjoyable to use. And he created that.

In his time with Pixar he helped create the computer animated feature, and paved the way for new stories to be told.

I don’t see any way that Steve Jobs saw his life as a failure, or that it had turned him into “a twisted being”. Steve was a Zen Buddhist, deeply at peace with ‘what is’.

The fake deathbed quote talks about how he was surrounded by life support (he wasn’t, he died at home), and that he had “little joy”.

I don’t think so.

As far as I can see it, Steve followed his dream, his vision, and his heart. For sure, he had feet of clay. He had his weaknesses. There were times when he wasn’t an easy boss. But then anyone with a vision is going to concentrate on pursuing that vision.

I agree with pieces of the post. All you can have at the end of life are “the memories precipitated by Love”. Those are “the true riches which will follow you, accompany you, giving you strength and light to go on.” Although perhaps the things that you do, or your heirs do, with your material inheritance also goes on. Perhaps your achievements remain behind, inspiring others to achieve as you achieved.

If we forget love, we forget everything. Steve knew that. In an article published in Time magazine Walter Isaacson, his biographer, recorded him as saying:

I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.

The article continues: “He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That’s what made him so great,” he added. “Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, ‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done’.”

So let’s not succumb to the poison that says that you should shun success, that it will make you unhappy. Following our hearts, and our dreams, and our vision – while coming from a place of love and peace and kindness – can only make the world a better place. And that’s what Steve would want you to hear.

 

Find out more at www.timhodgson.org

PS. According to his sister, Mona Simpson:

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

 

Now THAT’S amazing..

Mar 13

Lessons learned from a rubber duck

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In 1992, a shipping container fell overboard on its way from China to the United States, releasing 29,000 rubber ducks into the Pacific Ocean. Ten months later, the first of these rubber ducks washed ashore on the Alaskan Coast. Since then, these ducks have been found in Hawaii, South America, Australia, and traveling slowly inside the Arctic ice.

But 2,000 of the ducks were caught up in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of currents moving between Japan, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the Aleutian Islands. Items that get caught in the gyre usually stay in the gyre, doomed to travel the same path, forever circulating the same waters. But not always. Their paths can be altered by a change in the weather, a storm at sea, a chance encounter with a pod of whales.

20 years after the rubber ducks were lost at sea, they are still arriving on beaches around the world, and the number of ducks in the gyre has decreased, which means it’s possible to break free. Even after years of circling the same waters, it’s possible to find the way to shore.

(Jake’s intro from “Touch”)

All of us get stuck sometimes. Whether it’s a habit or a behaviour that doesn’t serve us, an addiction that has us at its mercy, or a toxic relationship. Perhaps we find ourselves in debt and can’t see a way out. Or perhaps we’re stuck in the perpetual nothingness of procrastination, knowing what we should do but seemingly unable to make progress. I’ve been there. And there is a way out. If we choose it. If we pursue it. If we trust it.

And if we only believe – then our belief makes it real.