This document provides an overview of the psychology and philosophy of Steve Jobs based on his autobiography and the observations of others. It discusses how Jobs' perfectionism, reality distortion field, ability to focus, and spirituality contributed to his visionary leadership and success in transforming multiple industries. Key events that shaped his psychology included being adopted as a child, dropping out of college, being fired from Apple, and his spiritual experiences investigating Buddhism and taking LSD. The document aims to understand the mindset that allowed Jobs to inspire others and achieve the impossible through his uncompromising drive and confidence in his vision of the future.

1. The Psychology of Steve Jobs
Written by Ivan Staroversky - www.StarOverSky.com
Counselor in the field of applied positive psychology & NLP coach

2. Table of Contents
Introduction" 3
Everything begins in childhood" 4
Perfection and Elegance! 5
Attitude - The Secret of Success! 5
The Reality Distortion Field" 7
The Power of Focus" 8
Spirituality " 9
Simplicity" 11
Design Principles - The Studio of Jobs and Ive! 11
Motivation! 12
What motivated Steve Jobs to keep moving forward:! 13
Think Different" 15
Steve Jobs on purpose — in his own words! 17
Intuition from the future" 18
Immortality " 20
Bibliography " 21

3. Introduction
Every once in a while a great thinker comes along that changes everything. It’s very
fortunate if you can live during the time of one of these thinkers in your life. I have been
very fortunate in that I had the opportunity to see Steve Jobs inspire people and
businesses to change the world and make it a better place.
Much of what you are going to read in this article is taken from Steve Jobs’s
autobiography written by Walter Isaacson. I think that this is one of the best books I
have ever read not only because I have learned a lot from it, but because it allowed me
to get a better understanding about the psychology and philosophy of Steve Jobs.
Like many people out here, I have never met Jobs but over the past few years I was
inspired by him to focus on the important things in my life and create great products and
services that bring value to people. Steve Jobs simplified the way we communicate with
each other and the way we create things. Simplicity, fun, and inspiration are the words
that I associate with the products created by Steve Jobs. However, this article is not
about products or software, but about the psychology of Steve Jobs.
While reading Steve Jobs’s biography I was specifically focusing on trying to understand
the psychology that made Jobs successful and how he was able to transform many
industries with his vision of the future and philosophy of product design.

4. Everything begins in childhood
According to the theory of life scenarios, how we live our life greatly depends on the
experiences that we have during the first 7 years of our life (1). There are four main
scenarios that people live by:
• I am OK, you are OK - a rather rare scenario where the main message is live and
be happy.
• I am not OK, others are OK - one of the most common scenarios where people
learn not to be and not to do something.
• I am OK, you are not OK - is common in people who were highly praised during
their childhood. These people often use others as instruments that help them get
what they want.
• I am not OK, you are not OK - common to people with low self-esteem who
learned that their brain is useless and they can’t change anything in life.
Steve Jobs was an adopted child and his step-parents made him aware from an early
age of the fact that he was adopted. As disappointing as it was for him to know this, his
parents also made sure to tell him that the reason why they chose him was because he
was special. His emotional childhood trauma about discovering that he was adopted set
him on the lifetime course to prove to his biological parents that they made a mistake of
abandoning him. One of his unconscious goals was to make great things happen so
that when he would finally meet his biological mother, he would be able to tell her that
he turned out to be much better than she thought of him when she left him.
Jobs was also bullied in school and he demanded that his parents put him in a different
school. If he really wanted something, he was able to find a way to manipulate or
persuade his parents to bend to his will. Thus, the ingredients of Jobs’s psychology
were formed — unconscious desire to prove that he was special to his biological
parents and a foundation to convince people about something that he strongly believed
in.

5. Perfection and Elegance
Jobs’s father was a mechanic who taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring
about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. His father loved doing things right
even if no one would ever see his craft. For instance, his father said they need to craft
the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden because
everything had to be done the right way from the inside out. The curvature, the
elegance, and the beauty of Apple’s products are a reflection of Jobs’s childhood
lessons from his father.
Attitude - The Secret of Success
Throughout his career, Jobs thought of himself as a rebel fighting against an evil empire
of boring products and cluttered software. He was an enlightened Jedi that wanted to
make the world a better place. He had a vision of the future that he thought was right for
everyone, and he did everything that he could to turn his vision into a reality. He also
knew that most people do not know what they want in life and that is why he took the
liberty to invent the future rather than listen to opinions and adjust to the future. He
thought that customers don’t know what they want until he showed them.
Malcolm Gladwell thinks that Jobs was a tweaker who inherited things as they were,
and had to push and pull them towards some more nearly perfect solutions (2). I tend to
agree more with Chunka Mui who thinks that Steve Jobs was a great visionary and the
real lesson to be learned from Steve Jobs is that, to really innovate, you have to think
big. (3). Jobs was a master of seeing the dots and connecting the dots that turned into
great products. He didn’t invent many things completely, but he was a master at putting
together ideas, art, and technology in ways that created the future.
Reinvent yourself and your vision
Throughout his career, Jobs had to reinvent himself and Apple several times. One of the
best things to ever happen to Steve was when he was fired from Apple and was told to
get lost. It was tough and emotionally devastating for Steve to get fired from his own
Company, but that loss did not kill him an instead it made him stronger. He was able to
use all of his instincts, both good and bad to create a new company.

6. “If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too
much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and
throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the
harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say,
‘Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.’ And they go and
hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.” - Steve Jobs
One of the things that Jobs was known for was brining the magic back to the company
and focusing on what truly matters. Under Steve Jobs, there was zero tolerance for not
performing. When he came back to Apple, he often told many stories to his team about
how everything that he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the
rewind button and how he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect.
“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later. That’s what
other companies do. The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up
with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.” -
Steve Jobs
Keep moving forward
In the back of his mind, Jobs thought that he was special, a chosen one that is destined
to do something great for the world just like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met
in India. A sense of enlightenment, a great vision, and strong persistence helped him
move through many obstacles. There was a time when Apple’s stock price, which had
been above $60, fell 50% in one day, and later went below $15.
None of this discouraged Jobs from continuing to push for distinctive, even distracting,
new designs of his products. He had a vision of how he wanted the future to be and
passion that kept him moving forward. Even cancer did not stop him from dreaming big
dreams and moving forward until the very end. “Living with a disease like this, and all
the pain, constantly reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to
your brain if you’re not careful. You don’t make plans more than a year out, and that’s
bad. You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.” - Steve Jobs

7. The Reality Distortion Field
The reality distortion field is the ability to create a belief that is so powerful that it sucks
other people into believing that it is true. Steve Jobs had the ability to willfully defy
reality, not only to others but to himself. He was able to deceive himself in a way that
allowed him to persuade people into believing his vision, because he has personally
embraced and internalized it. Just like Walt Disney who once said “It’s kind of fun to do
the impossible” Steve Jobs liked to bend reality.
The mechanism of the reality distortion field lies in the ability to create a self-fulfilling
distortion to do the impossible because you do not realize it is impossible. The secret
ingredients of the reality distortion field for Jobs were a confounding mixture of a
charismatic rhetorical style, unshakable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the
purpose at hand. At the root of Steve Jobs’s reality distortion was his belief that the
rules didn’t apply to him. This belief began in his childhood during which he had often
been able to change reality that he did not like. Later in life, Nolan Bushnell taught Jobs
that if you act like you can do something, then it will work “Pretend to be completely in
control and people will assume that you are.”
A lot of people distort reality, but when Steve Jobs did so, it was often a tactic for
accomplishing something meaningful. For example, it enabled Jobs to inspire his team
to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources that other
people or companies had (IBM or Xerox). The reality distortion field was first associated
with Steve Jobs by his veteran colleagues at Apple. “Sometimes it was the inadvertent
misfiring of memory cells that happens to us all; at other times he was spinning his own
version of reality both to me and to himself.“ (4).
Jobs was able to project his belief of reality to other people and make them temporarily
forget that something is not possible to achieve. As Atkinson said “Because I didn’t
know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” A lot of discoveries in history have
been made by people who were not aware that they were not supposed to do
something or that something was not possible to begin with. Steve Jobs was one of
these people, but he was also able to project this psychology onto other people.

8. In the presence of Steve Jobs, reality sometimes became flexible and he was able to
convince anyone of practically anything. This effect wore off when he wasn’t around, but
it kept people moving forward. Sometimes it was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s
distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality. One of the
techniques that Jobs used to convince other people of something was to stare at the
person he was talking to. He would stare into someone’s eyeballs, ask some question,
and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes.
Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s marketing director tells a story about his experience in the
distortion field when Jobs was using the whiteboard to show the team how to make
something simpler and more user-friendly. “We would be nodding our heads and getting
excited and say, yes, yes, this will be great! And then he would leave and we would
consider it for a moment and then say, ‘What the heck was he thinking!’ He was so
weirdly charismatic that you almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him.”
The Power of Focus
With every year as the amount of information is rapidly expanding, the ability to focus on
what truly matters becomes more important than ever. One of Jobs’s great strengths
was knowing how to focus. For him, the ability to decide what not to do was as
important as the decision about what to do. This concept applies to both personal
decisions and business decisions. Specifically, Jobs had the ability to focus in on a few
things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as
revolutionary.
Jobs’s ability to focus can be described in three steps:
1. Set priorities,
2. Aim your laser attention on them,
3. Filter out distractions.
The power to focus and say “no” allowed Jobs to bring Apple back on track when it was
struggling on the market. “He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software

9. simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options” (4). His
love for simplicity came from his Zen training where he learned to appreciate intuition,
filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and appreciate minimalism. He
also loved to take long walks with people whenever he needed to make an important
decision in life.
When Jobs came back to Apple, he insisted that Apple focus on just two or three
priorities at a time and turn off the noise that is in the way. He was really good at
focusing on a few things and saying no to many things. Jobs had a way of focusing on
something with insane intensity for a while and then change his focus on something
else. Both, in his professional and personal life he would focus on what he wanted to,
when he wanted to, and on other matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how
hard people tried to get him to engage.
The most important advice Steve Jobs gave to Larry Page was to focus. “We talked a
lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a
team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would
have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The
main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up.
It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of
the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re
causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” - Steve Jobs
Spirituality
Steve Jobs was one of the best CEOs, a businessman, and a billionaire who changed
the world. What a lot of people don’t know is that he was also a very spiritual person.
First, lets look at the differences between religion and spirituality because some people
tend to confuse the two.
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that
establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values
(5).

10. Spirituality refers to the deepest values and meanings by which people seek to live. It
implies some kind of vision of the human spirit and of what will assist it to achieve full
potential (6).
Jobs emphasized that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences
rather than received dogma (4). There was a point in his life when he began to realize
that intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract
thinking and intellectual logical analysis.
One of the most profound experiences in his life was taking LSD after which he found
out that there’s another side to the coin. Even though Jobs did not recall all the details
of his psychedelic journey, he remembered the meaning of that experience. “It
reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making
money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as
much as I could” - Steve Jobs.
After Jobs spent seven months in Indian villages, he saw that the Western world is filled
with craziness and that people had very little capacity for rational thought. “If you just sit
and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it
worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle
things — that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more
clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a
tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.
It’s a discipline; you have to practice it” - Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was highly influenced by the teachings of Zen Buddhism. He believed that it
was important to avoid attachment to material objects. Peoples’ consumer desires are
unhealthy and to attain enlightenment you need to develop a life of non-attachment and
non-materialism. One of the most important lessons that Jobs learned from his Buddhist
days was that material possessions often cluttered life rather than enriched it. “Every
other CEO I know has a security detail. They’ve even got them at their homes. It’s a
nutso way to live. We just decided that’s not how we wanted to raise our kids” - Steve
Jobs.

11. Money is not evil, what people do with the money can be evil. Here is what Jobs had to
say about money “I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I
never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so
I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and
I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which
was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich,
when I also didn’t have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a
lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce
and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the
house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people.
This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not
going to let this money ruin my life” - Steve Jobs.
Simplicity
Being highly influenced by the ideas of Zen Buddhism, Jobs’s design philosophy always
remained constant: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” His strive for simplicity was
seen in his lifestyle and in the way that he dealt with people.
Isaacson provides a number of stories demonstrating how Steve Jobs demanded
simplicity in every step (4). One such story is about IBM and NeXSTEP negotiations.
“IBM would license the current version of the NeXTSTEP software, and if the managers
liked it, they would use it on some of their workstations. IBM sent to Palo Alto a 125-
page contract. Jobs tossed it down without reading it. ‘You don’t get it,’ he said as he
walked out of the room. He demanded a simpler contract of only a few pages, which he
got within a week” (4).
Design Principles - The Studio of Jobs and Ive
The foundation of Job’s psychology can be summarizes in two statements Less but
better. and Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Simplicity must come from
conquering complexities, not ignoring them. “It takes a lot of hard work, to make
something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with
elegant solutions. Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical

12. products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you
find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not
just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the
complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no
screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so
complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything
about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a
product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” - Steve Jobs.
• Get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential. Keep going back to
the beginning, again and again. Asks yourself “Do I really need this part? Can I
get it to perform the function of the other four parts?”
• Focus by eliminating excess product lines and cut extraneous features in the new
operating system software that Apple is developing.
• Simplicity and lack of distractions are keys to a great store, as they are to a
product. When technology enables something new, you must take advantage of
that as long as your remember the fundamental principles — less is always
more, simpler is always better.
• Sophistication comes from minimalism. Apple make progress by eliminating
things, and by removing the superfluous.
• Apple’s voice — simple, declarative, clean.
Motivation
The word motivation comes from the Latin verb movere, meaning to move. There are
two types of motivation — extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is based on the
idea that if you do this, then you will get that. In other words, extrinsic motivation is
based on an external reward that you will get once you will complete what you have to
do. Intrinsic motivation is based on the idea that the activity itself is the reward. Thus,
when you are intrinsically motivated, you do what you do because you enjoy it and not
because someone told you to do it or because you will get a reward for it. The
psychology behind Apple’s products is based on intrinsic motivation, which means that

13. when Apple designs the product, one of the main questions that employees at Apple ask
is — will I enjoy using this product myself? When many other companies, design a
product they focus on a different question — how much profit will this product bring us?
An example of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is the story behind Microsoft Zune.
When iPod came out in October 2001, it revolutionized the way people listen to music.
When Microsoft released Zune portable media player in November 2006, it was just
another clunky mp3 player that achieved a marketshare of less than 5% two years later
(4). Microsoft’s Zune was designed with profit in mind. Apple’s iPod was designed with
usability and joy in mind. “The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter.
The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the
way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for
ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family,
you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the
extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much” - Steve Jobs.
What motivated Steve Jobs to keep moving forward:
• Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives;
• Mastery - the urge to get better and better at something that matters;
• Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than
ourselves;
• Awareness of death — a true understanding that your time is limited.
Steve Jobs was driven by his desire to create great products that he would enjoy using
himself rather than products that would just bring profit to Apple. Every time a new
product or software was released by Apple, it became better and better at helping
people enjoy using digital technology. Jobs always knew that there is a big difference
between using a product and enjoying using a product.
Another factor that drove Steve Jobs was his awareness of how little time he had left in
this life. In his own words “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool
I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure,

14. these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of
thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to
follow your heart.” - Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson gives an example about ancient Rome when a victorious general
paraded through the streets, he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to
repeat to him, Memento mori: Remember you will die. This was a reminder of mortality
that helped the hero keep things in perspective, and not sink in pride (4).
When Steve Jobs had to take a medical leave due to his health problems, Tim Cook
gave an inspirational speech highlighting why Apple would continue to soar even with
Jobs absent. After hearing this speech, Jobs became emotionally wounded and deeply
depressed because it was not clear if Jobs would have to step down and become a
chairman rather than CEO. However, instead of continuing to be depressed, Jobs
became more motivated to get out of his bed, overcome the pain, and start taking his
restorative long walks again. “Living with a disease like this, and all the pain, constantly
reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to your brain if you’re
not careful. You don’t make plans more than a year out, and that’s bad. You need to
force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.” - Steve Jobs
One of the ways to recover for Steve Jobs was to start dreaming big even though life
ahead was short. He began to design, and then repeatedly redesign, a boat that he
wanted to build someday. When he got sick again in 2009, he almost canceled the
project but then realized that it is important to keeping moving forward even if the odds
of recovering were against him. “I didn’t think I would be alive when it got done, but that
made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to do, and maybe I
have a shot at being alive when it’s done. If I stop work on the boat and then I make it
alive for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I’ve kept going.” - Steve Jobs

15. Think Different
The original sixty-second version “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The
troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things
differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You
can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t
do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people
who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Apple is a company that encourages people to think outside the box and use computers
to help people change the world. All of us need a hero in our life to help us get through
challenges and tough times in our life. Sometimes to “Think Different” we have to get
inspired by other people who thought differently and achieved something great in their
life. When Apple created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history, they

16. featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo
and the words ‘Think Different’ in the corner.
Some of these people were Jobs’ favorite heroes such as Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon,
Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, and King. All of these people were creative people
who had taken risks, overcame failure, and bet their careers on doing things in a
different way. Jobs’s idea was to encourage people to define themselves as
anticorporate, creative, innovative rebels simply by the digital product that they used.
Apple did not just create products, it created a lifestyle that inspired people to do great
things. The product you use sends a message about who you are. Think Different
means that you are able to think for yourself and make your own decisions without
falling into the status quo.
Purpose
Viktor Frankl once said that the will to meaning is the basic motivation of human life.
Human beings are not in pursuit of happiness, instead they search for reasons to be
happy (7). He also said that even in the worst case scenario when everything is taken
away from you, your attitude to make mental and spiritual choices remains constant.
Daniel Pink argues that in general, people are purpose maximizers and that there are
three pillars of purpose: doing something that matters; doing it well; and doing it in the
service of a cause larger than ourselves (8). Steve Jobs was a clear example of
implementation of all of these ideas into reality.
Jobs emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich.
Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will
last. His goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do
the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater. He achieved this goal by making a
ding in the universe that will be remembered for a long time by many people around the
world.
When Jobs designed Apple computers, he did not care about processor speed or
memory as much as he cared about the creativity put into these computers. There was

17. a point in history when Apple had business problems and they had forgotten who they
were as a company. Jobs resolved this problem by helping Apple remember who its
heroes were, why they did what they did, and what they have accomplished. Steve had
a way of motivating other people by looking at the bigger picture and helping people see
it in bright light. “Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not
extraordinary in every realm. He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting himself in
other people’s shoes, but he cares deeply about empowering humankind, the
advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in their hands” - Laurene Powell
Jobs (Steve Jobs’s wife).
Steve Jobs on purpose — in his own words
“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to
make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a
profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not
the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to
make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you
hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. Some people say, “Give the
customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what
they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, If I’d asked
customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!” People don’t
know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market
research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went
before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from
now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built
Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple
to be.
They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do - keep
moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

18. What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being
able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent
the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own
clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders
that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and
to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that
most of us know how, because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays.
We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our
appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that
flow. That’s what has driven me.” - Steve Jobs
Intuition from the future
There is an interesting phenomenon and a theory in quantum physics, which suggest
that events n the future can affect what happened in the past (9). I have heard about
this theory in quantum physics, psychology, and spirituality. The basic idea is that your
possible future already exists and your intuition can pickup messages about your future
from the informational field that some people call noosphere, global consciousness, or
morphic fields. While reading Steve Job’s biography, I noticed two instances when Jobs
mentioned his awareness about his future death:
“Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed
to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history.
‘We all have a short period of time on this earth,’ he told the Sculleys as they sat around
the table that morning. ‘We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really
great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor
do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.” (4).
“Jobs told Egan, as he had a few other friends, about his premonition that he would not
live a long life. That was why he was driven and impatient, he confided. ‘He felt a sense
of urgency about all he wanted to get done” (4).
There are several possible revelations for these revelations about his future:

19. • Because he was a spiritual person who trusted his intuition, he was able to pick
up a signal from the informational field and understand its meaning.
• Going back to the theory of life scenarios established during childhood, people
with “I am not OK, you are OK” are destined to suicide as the final outcome of
their life. One such outcome is where these people work themselves to death,
which is what happened to Steve Jobs.
• This was a self-fulfilling prophecy that Jobs created himself or was convinced by
someone else. His cancer problems were a result of his own reality distortion
field going out of conscious control.
• These two stories are just a coincidence that have no relation to intuition. They
are just stories.
I cannot say which one of these theories is the right one, but based on what I know
about psychology, quantum physics, and spirituality, I tend to lean towards the first two
as they make the most sense to me.

20. Immortality
In the not so distant future people will be able to achieve immortality by not wearing out.
Great visionaries achieve immortality simply by doing one great thing. Steve Jobs was
one of these great visionaries who created the Apple lifestyle. Thanks to Isaacson’s
biography book, I have learned a lot about the power of focus, the beauty of
minimalism, and the importance of having purpose in life. I think that one of the things
that Jobs was trying to achieve was to inspire all of us to do our own great thing.
Thank you Steve.
I hope that you enjoyed this article and learned something important.
If you want to learn more or if you want to:
• Find your purpose in life
• Identify your goals
• Increase your motivation
• Learn how to cope with problems
• Learn more about life and yourself
Visit www.StarOverSky.com to discover more great content.

21. Bibliography
[1] Kovalev, S. V. (2009). Osnovy nejrotransforminga ili psichotechnologii upravlenija
realʹnostʹju. Moskva: Profit Stajl.
[2] Gladwell, M. (2011, November 14). The Tweaker: The Real Genius of Steve Jobs.
The New Yorker.
[3] Mui, C. (2011, November 15). Innovators Beware: The Danger of Viewing Steve
Jobs as a ‘Tweaker’. Forbes.com
[4] Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster.
[5] Lambek, M. (2001). A reader in the anthropology of religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
[6] Sheldrake, P. (2007). A brief history of spirituality. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
[7] Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.
[8] Pink, D. H. (2009). *Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. New York,
NY: Riverhead Books.
[9] Chivers, T. (2009, November 12). The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to
quantum physics. Telegraph.