Steve Jobs Was Wrong

How dare I challenge the illustrious, inimitable, and near god-like inventor of world-changing technological inventions, Steve Jobs! To be sure, I admire the man and his legacy as much as anyone. His creativity was astonishing, his ambition unparalleled. The man who wanted to put a ding in the universe put a dent in it the size of a galaxy.

On this the twentieth anniversary of his famous speech to the graduating class of Stanford University, I'd like to point out that he was wrong about a few things.

Owing to the respect accorded him as an inventor and businessman, Jobs is often looked to for his ideas about how to live a good life. The whole world has seen his 2005 address to the graduating class of Stanford University, where he delivered an inspirational pep talk to the young graduates. If you haven't yet seen it, it's well worth a listen:

Jobs' story is compelling, and he offers it as inspiration and guidance to young people just starting out in life. Unfortunately, you can't transpose his life experiences onto your life and expect them to serve as a blueprint for success. And even if you could, would you really want to live the kind of life he describes in his speech? Decide for yourself.

Lesson 1: Connect the Dots

Jobs' first lesson is to "connect the dots," that is, to pursue whatever interests you have in life with the assumption that in the future the metaphorical dots will connect in some meaningful way.

For example, he says that what he learned from studying proportional fonts later pertained directly to the creation of the graphical user interface of the Macintosh personal computer. Obviously, he couldn't predict that he would one day invent a computer that would benefit from having proportional fonts. Dot A and dot B connected themselves rather nicely.

Job's faith that everything will work out fine in the end seems to imply a teleology to the occurrence of random events. Perhaps my years of living have made me cynical, but there is no guarantee that an arbitrary set of pursuits will fit neatly together to form a magnificent life somewhere down the line. But Jobs says otherwise: "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 faith is necessary, he says, in order to have the courage to stay the course when pursuing an unconventional life path.

When I was a young'un, my interests in life were punk rock, punk rock, and punk rock. Did those dots converge in some meaningful way? I went on to become a technical writer, so, no, they did not.

Encouraging people to believe that things will somehow work out in the future with no planning aforethought, and that looking back you will see how it all really made sense, is WUWU nonsense. But Jobs was more mystical than people think. The spiritual classic, Autobiography of a Yogi, was one of his favorite books, and after his death, he had copies of it given to everyone who attended his funeral service.

For Jobs, things worked out in the serendipitous way he describes, but for the rest of us mere mortals, to assume that the same approach will produce similar results is naive and misleading. Jobs should have known better, but from the rarefied world he inhabited, it's not surprising that he didn't.

Lesson 2: The Passion Prescription

Jobs is famous for his belief that finding your passion is the key to a fulfilling life. While finding one's passion is an undeniably good thing, I disagree with how he approaches it: First he says that your passion must coincide with how you make a living, and then he describes passion as something that can be "discovered," as if it were laying hidden somewhere just waiting for you to find it.

Jobs justifies his contention that your passion and your job must be one in the same by making two points: 1) Since you have to spend a good part of your life working, you had best work at something you are passionate about and 2) To do great work, you must be passionate about it.

While I can certainly agree that spending your working life doing something you care about is ideal, for many there is no real-world job corresponding to their passion that pays a livable wage or any wage at all. As someone whose early adulthood friends and associates were crazy artists of various sorts-filmmakers, photographers, painters, sculptors, and writers-I can vouch for the fact that earning a living doing any of these things is hard if not impossible. For all but a chosen few, these occupations are no more than serious hobbies or vocations, not ways to earn a living.

Jobs' notion that you can "find your passion" the way you can find your missing house keys is misleading. Jobs stumbled across his passion as a teenager, and was in the right place at the right time to turn that passion into a successful company, aided by his unique talents and powerful ambitions and the technical assistance of Steve Wozniak. To him, it might have seemed as if passion is something that resides somewhere waiting to be discovered, like an easter egg, but this attitude practically guarantees failure.

By defining the task as one of finding something, you make it impossible to achieve since it's not a thing awaiting discovery. A better approach is to create your passion rather than search for it. How? By dedicating yourself to excellence in the pursuit of some worthy life purpose or purposes. Passion then arises from the pursuit of excellence in relation to the purpose, whatever it is. Worthy purposes are much easier to find than a vaguely defined and quixotic thing called "passion."

Lesson 3: Live Each Day as if It Were Your Last

Jobs discovered the inevitability of death at the tender age of seventeen. He read a quote that said, If you live each day as if it were your last, one day you will certainly be right. Knowing he would be dead "soon" made it easier for him to make the big decisions in his life because he realized that "you are already naked." In other words, what have you got to lose? It's all the same in the end.

I can see how Jobs' awareness of death put his life in perspective and made him less reluctant to take big risks, like buying Pixar, for example. But Jobs attitude carries with it another less benign possibility. If it's all the same in the end since you're inevitably going to die, why should anything you do matter, good or bad? His attitude, seemingly pregnant with existential wisdom, is really a two-edged sword that can be easily construed to justify amoral and antisocial behavior. There's a kind of nihilism at the core of that ostensibly wise insight.

Jobs ended his address on a positive note by encouraging his young audience to follow their hearts, listen to their inner voice, and "stay hungry, stay foolish." But in the end, I can't help but feel disappointed that his speech focused solely on the individual without connecting to a larger, more inclusive vision. Although he described death as a universal experience, calling it nature's greatest invention for clearing out the old and welcoming the new, he made no other effort to trace a connection between the individual and the universal.

Ultimately, the life Jobs describes in his speech is the life of an isolated individual living in a world where the only thing that matters is finding personal fulfillment. He offers no words of wisdom about life purposes, no encouragement to leave a legacy of some kind, no talk of what humans owe to the other humans with whom they share the planet, present and future.

I still admire Steve Jobs for his creative genius but not for his philosophical musings about life. In his Stanford speech, he strikes me as a brilliant but privileged white male with an elitist perspective on life. Sure, I'll stay hungry and foolish, but for a very different kind of life than the one he described.