Steve Jobs – Listen To Your Heart And Trust That Everything Will Work Out OK

The first time I saw Steve Jobs on TV I was amazed, he looked like such an ordinary kind of guy – ordinary in the sense of not looking like a big time businessman.  But he also looked like a thoughtful man, one who cared about depth in life.  The last time I saw him I felt sad; he looked exhausted through and through and I wondered what was wrong with him.  It was clear that something was.  And now the world mourns.

I know he’s left a technological legacy that is unparalleled, but I don’t want to write about that.  I’d do a lousy job at it anyway, being so technologically ignorant.  I want to write about something I discovered today as I was reading about him, something that really moved me.  He was a man who let himself follow his heart, let himself be.  His life wasn’t one smooth ride from start to finish, in fact it was often the opposite.  But it all worked out in the end.

He was adopted for a start.  His biological mother was an unwed college graduate who wanted him to be adopted by graduates.  When he was born, the couple who were going to adopt him – a lawyer and his wife – rejected him because they wanted a girl.  So he went to the couple who was the second choice – and they weren’t college educated.  In fact the husband hadn’t graduated from high school even.

Steve’s biological mother refused to sign the adoption papers at first, but eventually she relented when the couple promised they would send their adopted son to college.  But a person’s destiny is their destiny, and Steve’s destiny wasn’t to be a college graduate.  He dropped out after one semester because he couldn’t see any value in it and he didn’t want to waste the money that his parents had worked for and saved so diligently their whole lives.

There was no value for him because the courses he had to take didn’t interest him and he didn’t want to waste his parents’ very hard-earned money.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every kid thinking about going to college said I’m not going to do something that doesn’t interest me?  Everybody would be doing work they enjoyed.  The world would be a very different place.  Well, Steve Jobs got it right.  And has left us a legacy of real wisdom about life.

He stayed on campus but didn’t have any money, so he slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, sold Coke bottles for food money, and walked 7 miles every Sunday to the Hare Krishna temple for a weekly good – and free – meal.  He didn’t mind the discomfort, though.  It allowed him to sit in on a calligraphy course. He didn’t choose it as a big career move, but simply because the college had the best calligraphy instruction in the country and all the posters were so beautifully calligraphed.  He loved the art of it.  It moved his heart.

It seemed there was no way he could ever find a practical application for it.  Still he did it.  Either he was very naïve or he had a kind of wisdom that was incredibly solid, right at the core of him.  I believe it was the latter; a capacity to trust that life would work out, that it was OK to follow his heart.  As it turned out, he later applied what he learned in the calligraphy course to the first Macintosh computer – it was the first to be designed with beautiful topography.

The capacity to listen to his gut and heart and trust that everything would be okay was at the core of the man throughout his life.  In his own words, giving the Commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, he said “…you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”  Stanford Report, June 14, 2005.

And it’s made all the difference in our lives too.  R.I.P Steve Jobs.  You did good.