Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [32]
Chapter 9
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The applause fell silent on August 24, 2011. That’s when Steve Jobs sent a message addressed to “the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community” that began: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”
Steve never felt obligated to clue the world into the details of his health issues over the years until the outcome had been determined and ample time had passed. His surgery for a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004 wasn’t disclosed until after his surgery and healthy return. Another health problem, which was innocuously described at first as a “hormone imbalance,” turned into a six-month leave during which Steve underwent a liver transplant. The disclosures about his health, an expected practice for such a highly visible public business leader, came well after the operations and past the proper window, according to business analysts. Yet, Steve would reemerge, even during medical leaves, to take the stage and proudly show off his creations regardless of how gaunt he looked at the time. The world watched with awe and melancholy as Steve Jobs slowly disappeared before our eyes.
The rare times when Steve publicly waxed philosophical were the most memorable. Perhaps the most widely quoted is his 2005 commencement address to Stanford University’s graduating class: “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. 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.” 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.”
Having faced death several times, people looked to Steve for advice on dealing with the inevitable, and he was willing and eager to offer his guidance. One of the first calls Bob Longo, a former sales chief for NeXT Computer, made after getting diagnosed with cancer was to Steve. (They shared the same oncologist and radiologist.) The pair kept in touch, Bob recalled to the Pittsburgh Business Times, and he received an exuberant e-mail from Steve after Bob described his successful surgery. Bob said: “Messages from him were generally laconic. This one had 20 exclamation points. I have a cousin who’s a pretty well regarded cancer research doctor and told him the doctor Steve referred me to; he said, ‘Don’t even ask for a second opinion. Start your treatment.’”
Steve’s views on existence, as he increasingly faced his own mortality, became ever more poetic toward the end. He was intensely emotional at times. “I don’t think of my life as a career,” he told Time in 2010, “I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That’s not a career — it’s a life!” He shared his condolences and personal revelations with others facing similar pressures. A man named James e-mailed Steve on April 20, 2010 to thank him for supporting an organ donor program. James mentioned that his girlfriend had died of melanoma two years before. Steve replied: “Your most welcome, James. I’m sorry about your girlfriend. Life is fragile.”
We are all fruit hanging from branches. We ripen, rot and fall to the earth. Steve said in an interview with the Computerworld Honors Program in 1995: “We’re all going to be dead soon; that’s my point of view. Somebody once told me, they said, ‘Live each day