Stories from the Book – Taking Time Out and the Steve Jobs Story

When should we take a time out?

Pausing is the right choice if your life has any of the following characteristics. If you hate your job or hate the people you work with, you may need to pause long enough to reflect on what you will do about this. Life is too short to work in a horrible job or amongst power-driven or sociopathic colleagues for longer than you have to. Sure, you might have to put up with things for a while as you work out what to do, but pausing to think about today’s realities is an essential first step before considering future options.

The same is true of many of the other crises that may be afflicting you. You may be in an abusive relationship that is difficult to leave when there are assets and children and shared friendships involved. You may be fighting a degenerative illness that refuses to respond to your aggressive spirit and positive attitude, determined as you are to beat this “thing” that causes constant disruptions to your life and ever-present reminders of your mortality. You may have just lost your job or, like me, watched your business taken from you.

Whatever it is, things won’t change in the long-term unless you stop to recognise that what’s happened has, well, happened. And, paradoxically, by stopping, you will take the first step in coming back, the first move towards the good life, a life richer in meaning and greater in contentment. By stopping, paradoxically, you start.

This is what happened with Steve Jobs who, after pausing, set about creating one of the most amazing comebacks in business history. Jobs’s decade and a half of separation from his own creation, Apple Corp, transformed his attitude, his philosophy, and his life. Formerly arrogant beyond belief,

Fifteen years in the wilderness after being rejected by his own company changed all that: it made him human. This was a new Steve Jobs. Humbled by failure, elevated by the birth of his children, mellowed with age, yet still as headstrong and perhaps even more certain of his own decision making than ever before, Jobs now understood that it really was the many others who did the work: “Apple is a team sport.”[i]

Adopted soon after his birth in 1955, Steve Jobs always sought to create meaning in the void left by the abandonment he felt from his natural mother, despite the fact that his new parents were loving, caring people. A precocious and easily-bored child, Steve was tinkering with electronics by the age of 10. Living in Los Altos, San Francisco the family resided among a huge number of scientists and engineers. Bored at school at 13, Steve fell in with a school colleague of similar age, Bill Fernandez, and Fernandez’s 18 year-old university dropout neighbour, Steve Wozniak, who were working on one of earliest versions of the personal computer. Despite the difference in their ages, the two Steves were both intense and passionate, delighted to be fully absorbed in a project of their own creation.

Within a year or two, they had become great friends, and invented a machine using old electronic components that could confound AT&T’s computers and allow people to make long-distance phone calls without payment. It cost $40 to build and sold locally for up to $300. Leaving ‘Woz’, Steve went to college but soon gave up on attending classes. Nonetheless, he stayed to hang around college and ruminate and think. A dean of the time recalls that Jobs questioned everything as he sought to understand why things were as they were. Such an enquiring mind would stand him in good stead. This period, the first pause, gave him great clarity and depth of thinking.

Hired by Atari, Steve was only allowed to work at night since his hippie gear and associated odours repelled his colleagues and the company’s management. Struggling with the existential questions surrounding his birth, he sojourned to India, living in abandoned village buildings and begging for food as he travelled towards the Himalayas. The journey, while intense, didn’t answer his questions. He did turn, however, to Zen Buddhism for spiritual enlightenment. Arriving back at Atari in robes and shaved head, Steve soon found himself renewing his relationship with Steve Wozniak. Spotting an advertisement for a computer kit in a trade magazine, the two Steves decided to build circuit boards that hobbyists could load directly into their computer kits. When a local computer store owner asked if the young men could build the full machine rather than simply supplying the boards, the Apple I was born. When it didn’t sell well, Woz designed the Apple II, a machine with much greater functionality. Using an operating language that would make the computer quicker and easier to use for hackers seeking to write their own programs, Steve Jobs determined that the machine should be much quieter than the fan-cooled alternatives. His obsession with design, user-friendliness and functionality was born.

While continuing to improve the Apple II, Steve’s imagination was captured by an Intel advertisement that used symbols such as poker chips and sports cars instead of technical jargon. The use of symbolism would become a hallmark of the Jobs approach to marketing. He would also become known for his perfectionism, impatience and single mindedness. He could infuriate his staff yet simultaneously inspire them to walk over hot coals. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t without his flaws. When girlfriend Chris-Ann became pregnant in 1977, Steve abandoned her when she refused an abortion. As a man who set his own rules, he couldn’t countenance that someone else would choose not to follow them. After years of lamenting the loss of his biological parents, Steve left his new daughter without a father and ignored her existence for years. For much of this time, he refused to admit that he had fathered her.

As new applications like spreadsheet programs were added to the Apple II, sales soared. Using an alliance with Xerox to gain access to their ideas, innovations like pop-up windows, the mouse, word processing, art and drawing applications, and the ability to network between machines were developed. His next model, the Lisa, was over-priced and 5 years late to market. Steve’s abrasive approach and obsession with doing things his way began to alienate him from many of the other key Apple employees. As the low-priced, self-contained Macintosh (Mac) was being developed, Steve’s colleagues began to sideline him. While his innovative ideas for the look of the new machine proved invaluable, his manner proved intolerable. In 1985, an under-pressure Steve Jobs resigned from Apple. A former CEO at PepsiCo took his place. Steve was in tears when he left Apple. Close friends feared that he might commit suicide. A colleague found him lying on the floor of his home in the dark, inconsolable. Come the following day, however, Steve was talking comeback.

Taking time out, Steve travelled to Paris, then cycled Italy’s Tuscan hills. He visited Sweden and Russia. Returning to the US, he contemplated a career in politics. During the summer, he wandered the campus of Stanford University, spending time in the library to study research into DNA, biotechnology, and biochemistry. He began a new company, NeXT, and decided to design a computer capable of high-level research functions and those graphics, design, and animation tasks impossible for other machines. During his travels, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to sell the machine to Disney. While there, however, he obtained valuable insights into the worlds of animation and film-making. Finding experienced engineers he could entice, Steve purchased a special effects studio from George Lucas and attracted brilliant Disney animator John Lasseter to the new team. In the years that followed, the renamed Pixar would develop the technology and associated storylines to create new software applications that would become standards for the industry, as well as a veritable production line of hit movies including Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and The Incredibles. While the NeXT computer and its siblings would not prove particularly successful, by the late 1990s Pixar was reporting profits of $2.5 billion, making it the most successful Hollywood studio of all time.

Once again, Steve’s genius appeared to derive from using his time-outs to reflect on where markets were heading, on how fashions were changing, and what he could do to catch the waves before they broke.

Returning to Apple in 2000, Steve could see that the internet would provide the platform for a whole new world of products and applications. Having re-established Apple’s credibility with the radical-looking iMac, he brought to Apple a young genius who had great ideas for improving the relatively new MP3 player software. With the existing products selling poorly, Steve saw a market ripe for the picking. His brilliant idea was that people might download tracks off the internet directly onto a user-friendly, cool-looking device for personal use. The iPod was born. It became Apple’s most successful product ever. In the meantime, Pixar continued to churn out the hits. When Disney would buy Pixar in 2006, Steve would become Disney’s biggest shareholder, owning a slice of the company valued at more than $3.5 billion.

Having conquered two industries, having confronted the ups and downs of his life and having, through dealing with cancer, stared down his demons and his flaws, Steve Jobs could conclude what his most valuable lesson had been,

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 other’s 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.[ii]

Knowing which voice is your own in the clamour and cacophony of life really only comes with deliberately taking the time to stop, to pause, and to quiet your mind sufficiently to hear the still, small voice inside. If Steve Jobs, the hyperactive, always moving, impatient entrepreneur could pause for long enough to listen to his inner voice, so can you.

This is another story from Dr David Poole’s free eBook, Phoenix Rising.  Dr Poole is available as a speaker, writer, and trainer.

[ii] Steve Jobs, (2005) Commencement Address, Stanford University, 12 June.