This is the heartbreaking email Steve Jobs sent to himself before he died
Throughout his life, it has been proven time and time again that Steve Jobs’ leadership was the decisive factor in Apple’s tremendous success. Just one year after the launch of the first Mac, Steve was fired from his own company. He was deemed too disrespectful to remain at the helm of such a valuable company.
Sales were disappointing at the time, so the board made Steve Jobs pay, replacing him with John Sculley, an executive whom Jobs had convinced himself to leave Pepsi to join his team at Apple. For a while, it looked like they had made the right decision. Sales improved, and the promise of a new product line filled the executives with optimism. But as the years went by, they realized they didn’t really know what they were doing.
Making so many different products caused Apple to lose its identity. It stopped being the most advanced computing company, and became just another one in the pack. By 1997, Apple had barely 3.3% of the personal computer market, and its stock sold for just $14. No one thought of Apple as a revolutionary company anymore. That is, until they decided to buy NeXT, the company Steve Jobs had founded in the meantime. Upon his return, Steve Jobs would reclaim his former position as CEO, and the rest is history.
Much of Steve Jobs’s genius stems from his philosophy of life, which was based on three important motifs: a difficult childhood, psychedelics, and India. The American was adopted and had to change schools several times.
He had difficulty fitting in and was often discriminated against by his classmates, and he became a loner. In his senior year of high school, he began experimenting with LSD, feeling “the most amazing feeling of my life up until that point.” At the age of 19, he traveled to India in search of spiritual wisdom. He spent seven months visiting teachers at an ashrams.
He continued experimenting with the drug and eventually began practicing Zen Buddhism, the lessons he learned are clearly revealed in an email he sent to himself before his death.
An email sent from his iPad on September 2, 2010, and published in the Steve Jobs Archive, shows how Eastern philosophy profoundly influenced Steve Jobs' outlook. Written in prose, it reads as follows:
I grow a little of the food I eat, and I do it.
I didn't have to create or improve the seeds.
I don't produce my own clothes.
I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I haven't figured out the math I'm using.
I am protected by freedoms and laws that I did not imagine, legislate, implement, or demand.
I'm excited about music I didn't write.
When I needed medical care, I couldn't help myself to stay alive.
I didn't invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and my life and well-being depend entirely on them.
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Steve Jobs was born in the United States and lived the vast majority of his life in that country, but his values were Eastern. While Western philosophy is based on individualism, individual freedoms, private property, and democracy, Eastern philosophy - coming from India and China - approaches reality quite differently. It prioritizes the group, the community, the family over the individual.
For Hinduism and Buddhism—the third and fourth most widely followed religions in the world—the individual person is a mere grain of sand, with little individual significance. Pride is meaningless, because your existence is the product of billions of factors that have nothing to do with you. Through yoga (which means union) and meditation, these cultures seek to control the ego and separate themselves from their natural impulses. By reducing their involvement in individual concerns, the person feels part of the whole and will act accordingly.
The above email is a synthesis of these values, an acknowledgment that Steve Jobs, like all of us, was a product of his community. Had he not been born in San Francisco, so close to Silicon Valley, he certainly would not have become the most valuable CEO of all time. The same goes for the genes he inherited and the other influences that would make him an inimitable visionary. Toward the end of his life, he came to realize his insignificance, which probably filled him with immense gratitude. However, his philosophy of life had a devastating effect on his health.