Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [103]
Steve Jobs on Death
While I was researching Inside Steve’s Brain, I read everything I could lay my hands on about Jobs, including just about every book and magazine article published in the last couple of decades. One of the most striking things about these interviews was how many times Jobs mentioned death as the driving force in his life.
Over and over Jobs said he was driven to make an impact before his time ran out. It was such a recurrent theme, I thought of devoting an entire chapter to the subject in this book. Jobs had an obsession with death that would rival even Emily Dickinson’s.
Even in his twenties, Jobs obsessed about the end of his life. He told Sculley he was convinced he would live a very short life and urgently needed to have an impact before he died. According to Sculley’s autobiography, Sculley thought this was why Jobs was so driven and ambitious. Of course, Jobs lived much longer than he originally suspected.
In 2005, Jobs made a commencement speech to the graduating class at Stanford. A big portion of his speech focused on death and how it is perhaps life’s most important invention. Jobs told the young students:5
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
He continued:
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Jobs told the Stanford graduates about his cancer diagnosis, and how the prospect of death had ceased to be just a useful intellectual concept. He continued:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
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.
Apple without Jobs will certainly never be the same. But during his medical leave of absence—and in the thick of the worst economic downturn in recent history—Apple managed to post record revenues and a near 10 percent jump in Mac sales.
With or without Jobs, the company appears to be recession proof.
Critics’ long-time complaint that Apple’s products are overpriced is clearly bogus. The company’s success—whether we’re in a recession or not—proves that there’s a big and growing market for good quality, get-what-you-pay-for products. If Jobs’s replacement continues with this philosophy, and Cook has explicitly said he will, the company will thrive.
Apple certainly does not need a leader who wants to be the new Steve. Someone who tries to run roughshod over the talent, brains, and experience Jobs has built up at Apple over the last ten years would be a disaster.
But it appears that a low-key leader like Cook won’t do this. He may not give dazzling keynotes, but he will quietly and competently enable the company’s stellar engineers, programmers, and designers to continue to lead the PC industry with innovative products. And that is a future that everyone can look forward to.
Aknowledgments
Many thanks for help and support from everyone who gave their time for interviews, shared