What’s the price of success? Lessons to be learned from Steve Jobs anger (mis)management
Recently I had what could have been called a lightly heated discussion with a friend who was saying that Steve Jobs will go straight to heaven for his contribution to humanity.
I put another view, that he failed to learn to be healthy, which for me is a basic lesson and one of the new hallmarks of real success, and he might have some issues at the Pearly Gates… and would probably be sent back down to learn those lessons…
Just the other day, I heard another friend mention that Steve Jobs was an angry man… very angry… which interested me somewhat, because I couldn’t quite equate that with the ergonomically designer beauty of iPhones, MacBooks and the like… and Steve Jobs’ innovative and groundbreaking attitude.
OK, I will come clean, unlike 99.99%, it seems, of the world’s population, I never owned anything Apple ever made (so far…) and the fact that my older sister was into Apple Macs before I could even afford my first PC also was a huge turn off. Still to this day, I get mystified when someone asks me to help them with some Apple something. But, there is still hope for me, despite writing this on a PC!
So, in an effort to get some more background info, I turned to Google; Google (arguably one of his top competitors for technical and content innovation, excellence and more…) has the facility that gives you suggestions in a drop down box… and I put in Steve Jobs ang…
…and before I could get to …ry
…there it was, 10 variations on Steve and angriness references; so I decided to write something on the angry man because his impact on the world is undoubted and we can learn a lot of positives from that, and also in his demise we can learn a huge lesson or two.
The following are from Google related to this search for “Steve Jobs angry man”, so you can see for yourself what kind of man and what kind of behaviour was behind the success story known as Apple… and on the other side of the coin, the story of his sickness and untimely death.
Source 1: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/steve-jobs-was-an-assaholic/
„Being a manipulative asshole was one of the Apple visionary’s keys to business success, but it was also something he tried to recover from outside of the professional sphere.“
“I read and loved every single word of the new Steve Jobs biography—I admit it. But not because it reinforced the view that Jobs is our generation’s Einstein. Not because it detailed his legendary technological vision. I loved it because the book got underneath all that to the complexity of being an artist, a genius, a perfectionist, a child abandoned by his birth parents, a father, a husband, and most of all, a raging asshole.
Just after reading about the 1984 launch of the Macintosh and Jobs travelling to Europe to meet Apple salespeople and piss off the majority of the continent with his arrogance, I arrived at my favourite passage in the whole 571-page book:
It was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s manager in France. Gassée was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. “He has his own way with the truth,” Gassée later remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to out-bully him.” When Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France’s allocation if Gassée didn’t jack up sales projections, Gassée got angry. “I remember grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry man myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.” (Page 185)…”
Source 2: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/09/angry-black-man-real-reason-why-we.html
„This angry black man put out a video last fall threatening my life, and I have to tell you, it kind of scared me. He even has a Web site called “I want to smack Steve Jobs in the face.” Eek.“
Source 3: http://www.bryanappleyard.com/isaacsons-steve-jobs/
Isaacson’s Steve Jobs
“Sunday Times, 30 October 2011”
“Deeply sedated after his liver transplant in 2009, Steve Jobs felt an oxygen mask being fitted to his face. He pushed it away, saying he hated the design, and demanded to be shown five different options so he could choose a mask he liked. He also scorned the clunky lines of the oxygen monitor on his finger.
“He was very attuned to every nuance of the environment and objects around him,” said his widow, Laurene Powell, “and that drained him.”
Jobs — by common consent the greatest businessman of the age, the equal of Edison and Ford — finally succumbed to cancer on October 5. That precipitated the earlier than planned publication of Walter Isaacson’s biography, which is official to the extent that Jobs co-operated, unofficial to the extent that he did not approve, or, indeed, read the text.
The initial reception, based on leaks rather than close reading, has been broadly the same as that accorded to Apple’s iPhone 4S, which came out at roughly the same time — eagerness tinged with disappointment. Like the phone, the book is not quite as stuffed full of new goodies as rumour suggested.
This is not fair. At the simple headline level, it is true that the revelations are not that astounding. Jobs put off surgery when his pancreatic cancer was first diagnosed in 2003, preferring to endure months of diet quackery (vegan with lots of fresh carrots and fruit juices) which may have let the cancer spread to his liver. He advised Clinton to come clean on Monica Lewinsky and told Obama he was a one-term president. An adoptee, he unknowingly met his biological father — he ran a restaurant in San Jose that Jobs frequented near the Apple HQ. In anger, he said he was willing to spend $40 billion on destroying Google’s Android phone operating system on the grounds that it infringed Apple copyrights. He said that Bill Gates should have followed his own example and taken LSD. And so on.
But the point about these revelations is not that they are uninteresting, it is that they are predictable. If you read the Apple blogs and previous books about Jobs for any length of time, if you use his eerily beautiful machines, Steve will be as familiar to you as that mad uncle who turns up every few weeks with a new bee in his bonnet. There were his sweet adoptive parents, his hippie wanderings in India, his Buddhism, his veganism, his hallucinogens and even the peculiar smell he exuded as a young man — he disdained showers and deodorants, convinced he could be purified by diet. It’s all out there, well known in advance of this book.
This global familiarity was plainly a problem for Isaacson, as was his own reluctance to take on the task. Jobs first approached him in 2004 and he responded that it was too early. But he finally agreed in 2009 when he discovered that it was almost too late — Jobs was dying. As a result, unlike previous Isaacson biographies, notably of Einstein, the book has a rushed feel. Towards the end he is simply ticking off a list of product launches and medical problems.
But, in spite of all that, a more intensified version of Jobs does emerge from these pages and Isaacson’s ultimate judgments are sound.
“Was he smart?” he asks. “No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.” This is spot-on. Jobs was, in fact, a slow learner in business. Having founded Apple and precipitated the personal-computer revolution in 1976 when he was 21, he was driven out in 1985 primarily because of his inability to control his own passions or to grasp the dynamics of a large company. Next, the company he then founded, was a disaster because he could not restrain his neurotic pursuit of product perfection even as the millions flowed out of the door and the beautiful computers remained unsold. That oxygen mask was just the last in a long line of inappropriate aesthetic demands.
The problem was emotional incontinence. When Gates negotiated with him, he got colder and colder while Jobs got angrier and angrier. In fact, for me, the most fascinating revelation in this book is the number of times Jobs burst into tears. He seems to cry at the drop of a hat, usually when thwarted. Tears flowed, for example, when he discovered that CDs would be inserted via a tray into the first iMac rather than by a cool slot like the one in his Mercedes. The flip side of the crying, of course, is the rage. There is a kind of terrible comedy running through the narrative as one wide-eyed engineer after another presents his finest works to Jobs only to be told, “This is s***!”
In one employee interview, he took against the earnest candidate so viciously that he humiliated him with his questions and ended up just chanting “Gobble, gobble, gobble” in his face. Even Jonathan Ive, his design chief and closest lieutenant, was dismayed by his brutality. He observed that it was Jobs’s own sensitivity that made him so good at hurting others and, in some way, he needed to do this — “His way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody,” said Ive.”
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this “
Said Steve Jobs , In An Interview With Walter Isaacson On Android
Source 5: http://macosx.com/forums/apple-news-rumors-discussion/295548-steve-jobs-still-angry-man.html
Is Steve Jobs still an angry man?
“I just saw Pirates of Silicon Valley and I was surprised to find Steve overworking and really just being an abusive guy. My question, is he still like this or has he learned his lesson from what happened? Answer the question or discuss the movie in general. Thanks!”
*Not sure if this was the right forum, sorry.”
Source 6: http://www.winrumors.com/steve-jobs-describes-microsoft-as-irrelevant-in-biography-blames-ballmer/
„Steve Jobs describes Microsoft as “irrelevant” in biography, blames Ballmer“
„Excerpts from Steve Jobs’ official biography have been making the rounds this week. The book goes on sale on Monday but several publications have published snippets of some parts of Jobs’ musings. WinRumors reported on Friday that Jobs thought Bill Gates was “unimaginative and has never invented anything.” Jobs also claimed that Gates “just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.” The New York Times posted one excerpt on Friday that appears to shed light on Jobs’ feelings towards Microsoft as a competitor and Steve Ballmer as a leader. The NYT describes the final pages of the book:
“In the final pages of the book, written in Mr. Jobs’s own words, he described Microsoft as “mostly irrelevant” and said companies like it often ran aground when they were run by salespeople. He singled out Apple’s former chief executive, John Sculley, and Microsoft’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, as examples, adding that he didn’t think Microsoft would change as long as Ballmer was in charge.”
„A super-thin, super stylish laptop. And no, it’s not an Apple“
„Having just read Steve Jobs’s official biography, I can vouch that he was a very, very angry man.
His unearthly power over intuitive touchscreens and strokeable aluminium casings seems to have been extracted in some demonic pact where Mephistopheles departed ‘downstairs’ with Jobs’s ability to su‑ffer fools – or indeed anyone else – gladly, along with Jobs’s formerly luxuriant mop of hair.
I’m genuinely terrified of what Jobs might say if he had seen Asus’s Zenbook. „
————-
So, what can I say?
The liver is energetically reflected, when it is out of balance, with the negative emotion of being angry… and likewise, when someone is angry, this imbalances and damages their liver energy and functions and can lead to liver disease. You can say it started with his pancreas, but they are all energetically connected and after all, his liver, in the end, killed him (or should I say, he killed his liver?)
So, according to natural laws of energy, like the natural laws of gravity, they cannot be changed and we are subject to them. However, so far, not many people know about the natural laws of energy, whereas lots of people know about gravity etc.
The key to life is to learn this reality, this new reality, and that is manly based in our behaviour. If we don’t learn to change our behaviour and continue to do things the old, angry, un-peaceful, worried, nervous etc etc (basically, negatively emotional) way, well, like the dinosaurs, we will die out…
Steve changed his diet and tried lots of methods to get better. The single most important thing he didn’t do was… change himself, his genes, his reactions, his behaviour, by changing his energy and his messages. Well, for sure not enough, or he’d still be here pushing through the latest innovations and breakthroughs for the tech market as Apple CEO.
In E Rejuvenation, we train and help people to change for the better, for their and everyone else’s good. We are a company dedicated to teaching that true success can be measured by happiness, peace and lifelong health. It’s the only programme that changes everything from physical to mental, from emotional to genetic, from relationship to money, health… to make people super positive in reality, because they are full of super positive energy, not just philosophy and words.
We tried to contact Steve, but couldn’t find a way through to him… never mind, next time! We are sure he would have loved our programme and helped us develop the next phase in preventative healthcare and many other programmes, from business leadership to Forever Young programmes.
Finally, I would like you to leave this page with a smile on your face!!!
In Croatia, there’s a joke about Mujo and Haso… and God.
Well, I also have a joke;
Steve Jobs arrives at the Pearl Gates and he’s soooo angry with God!
SJ: “God, why didn’t you save me? Why I had to die? I was changing the world and making it a better place, whilst Microsoft is old fashioned and is wrecking people’s lives with their terrible small minds and safe ways… Google are plain cheats and rip-off merchants and don’t get me started about all the other m***********s. Why didn’t you save me God??? WHY!”
Gd: “My son, I sent you many people to help you save… your self…”
SJ: “Who, Godam it!”
Gd: “Bill Gates, John Sculley, Steve Ballmer, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Charles Geschke, John Warnock, Shantanu Narayen… do you want me to go on Steve?“
SJ: „Hmm, I think you’re trying to tell me something! I need to analyse this for some time. To digest and reciprocate with my incredibly clever mental iCapacities and iDrives. Don’t call me, I’ll call you!“
Gd: „That’s fine, I have eternity to wait for you Steve; meanwhile, can you please design some iGod iHeaven apps whilst you’re here?“
SJ: „Sure, as long as after you let me through these old fashioned and rather low tech gates, you don’t let in any of those aforementioned uni-dimentional f*** brained losers you said you sent me before…
Some time later…
SJ: „Hey God, i was thinking a lot about what you said… iRealised what you were telling me… that those guys were there to teach me that iAm the greatest human to ever walk the planet below; iFinally found my match up here with you God, iThink you’re going to enjoy my (omni)presence and that iCan teach you a thing or two…!“
Gd: „iGod, help me!“
