Email Steve Jobs sent to himself 1 year before his passing | Hacker News Reader

Email Steve Jobs sent to himself 1 year before his passing

officechai.com

114 pointsnixass65 comments

I first saw this email in the recently released book "Make Something Wonderful". It was curated by his widow Laurene Powell Jobs. She would definitely have unprecedented access to his archives and maybe some incentive to persevere his memory (though not all widows are so devoted). For what it's worth, I found the book to be a great tribute to a life and well worth the time spent reading it and the purchase price (it was free a few months ago when it was released): https://books.apple.com/us/book/make-something-wonderful/id6...

On a more personal note, I understand the impulse oppose the deification of Steve Jobs (or anyone else for that matter), but I think doing so without understanding why people look up to him misses something important. As soon as you deviate from the straight well worn path to success you quickly realize that people around you really don't like that you are doing something different (even if it is not that radical). Both strangers and friends will question you, they will criticize you and they will try to make you doubt yourself at every step of the way. Steve Jobs is one of the few dissenting voices who shows you that it can be done and it is important to try. I'm sure there are other people you can point toward for inspiration. There are probably more creative, more compassionate, more ethical folks out there to drive this point home, but that's really not the point.

Thanks for sharing, I found this passage from that book really insightful:

"We believe that as the price points come down, as the consumer market blossoms, design and fashion become even more important. Let me give you an example. This is [an image of] the most popular watch in the world. And it’s popular not because it tells time better than any other watch. It’s popular because of its design. I’ll give you an interesting statistic: ten years ago, the average American owned one watch. Because of design entering the watch market, today the average American owns seven watches. OK? Seven watches because of design. Because of fashion.

Now, when we dream, we dream of this. Right? [Audience laughs.] And one of the great joys that I found at Apple a year ago was the best industrial design team I’ve ever seen in my life. The designs for the new PowerBook G3 and the iMac—they’re all done inside Apple by some brilliant, brilliant, super hardworking people. And you’re going to see a continual stream of very innovative design out of Apple—I think the best in the industry by a mile.

These are four incredibly powerful, unique, compelling assets: the brand, the installed base, especially in the consumer and education markets, the ability of our design to really take these products into that consumer space of fashion, and the fact that our products are dramatically simpler to set up and use than our competition’s." -Steve Jobs Speech at Macworld July 1998

Not that this diminishes the truth those words speak, but I’m very cautious not to deify people in this manner. Countless people have said and preached similar kinds of rhetoric at places of worship every week, and then go and lead a life contrary to their lessons.

Trying to make a big deal out of Jobs emailing himself these phrases feels like a bit much. But there’s an opportunity not to talk about Jobs but to talk about those phrases.

I agree, the tendency to deify Jobs (or any other human) is unhealthy and one of my least favorite traits of humanity. As much as we humans don't like to consider our close relation to other primates, we definitely do still have the heavy instincts of identifying and following dominant personalities, and thinking of them as god-like in some ways. It might be futile to try to fight againt instinct/nature but I have to hope that we can use our advanced reasoning ability to progress as a species beyond this silliness.

A quarter of people are authoritarian by nature, this baseline percentage hasn't really changed through the years (although it can vary up or down a bit due to circumstances - a lot more people would find themselves in that camp immediately after 9/11, for example). Technology is not going to do much because people are not blank slates as much as we like to believe otherwise; it's genetically built in. So unless we propose to drug people/alter their DNA, authoritarians will still predominantly exist.

Better give those people a benign / benevolent version of a role model than leave it up to chance.

It aligns the email with the tradition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which were originally private notes for the author’s own purposes. However, Jobs was a public figure who likely anticipated that his private emails would become a part of his legacy.

Or maybe Steve left his computer unlocked when going to the bathroom, and a ninja that was hiding in his house then wrote the email without him noticing.

Reminding oneself about things like this is an indication that these are things one needs to be reminded of... acknowledging weaknesses, but having them as well.

I could think of a few things that I should be reminding myself of, but, for example "thou shall not steal" isn't one of them. Going out shoplifting isn't something that even occurs to me, but some people might need that.

>lead a life contrary to their lessons

My point being, writing a message like this to yourself is a strong indication of self-knowledge. These are the lessons I need to learn, the things I need to be reminded of. This wasn't someone preaching all of these things to others, but privately reminding themselves. The general in a triumph needs the memento mori.

The only time "Sent from my iPad" is an appropriate conclusion.

Interesting, but also interesting that he chose to take control of his own health rather than recognizing he didn't do the research of modern medicine that would save his life.

Instead he did his own research and died from it.

*Edit* I'm wrong. Jobs did in fact get his cancer treated and this meme I fell for is misinformation. [1]. It really seems like jobs did everything in his power to control the cancer and wasn't just winging things like I previously thought.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/s...

Jobs famously lived in a "reality distortion field" as Walter Isaacson calls it. His entire life he adopted extreme diets (like only eating apples or other fruit, he called it being a "fruitarian") and would adamantly deny things from others (even when there were many reports) that contradicted his belief. In his 20s he had famously bad hygiene, going weeks without showers and being so smelly that people couldn't stand it. He refused to wear shoes and his feet would be absolutely filthy and black with dirt and grime, and he would even put them up on people's desks. He would adamantly deny that he smelled bad or needed a shower saying (and believing) things like, "I don't need to shower because my fruitarian diet makes it so I don't stink." Everyone else was wrong, not him[1][2].

Given that, it's not surprising to me at all that he thought he could treat his own cancer with just diet, and assumed doctors were just wrong.

[1]: "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson

[1]: Classic Simpsons reference: https://i.imgflip.com/3pqr2e.jpg

> rather than recognizing he didn't do the research of modern medicine that would save his life.

Back when Jobs got cancer and the media were discussing it I clearly remember reading that with that type there's higher than 90% death rate.

IIRC, jobs found the cancer at it's earliest stage, which has an 80% 5 year survival rate if treated. [1]

Pancreatic cancer tends to move fast and survival plummets as it advances.

*Edit* looks like jobs did in fact undergo treatment for his cancer back in 2004. He didn't go though chemo, but IDK if that'd make the difference. [2]. I need to not be so critical of him, it's likely he did actually listen to medical advice and I simply fell for a common incorrect Internet meme.

[1] https://pancan.org/facing-pancreatic-cancer/about-pancreatic...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/s...

Idk what about that abcnews link makes you think you fell for misinformation. Jobs getting a surgery close to the discovery of the cancer doesn't contradict him not following doctors' advice to use chemotherapy. He spent 7 years attempting to just eat fruit to fight off a mostly curable cancer, and it didn't work.

I was under the impression that Jobs did nothing for his cancer. He did, in fact, have it surgically removed.

He further underwent several surgeries for various problems after the pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

It's not clear to me that a doctor wouldn't have advised against chemo for the pancreas. Chemo doesn't always get recommended for cancer treatments (especially now-a-days) and it's not shocking to me that a doctor would potentially recommend against it in his case (super early detection with apparently successful surgery).

A little bit like how if you get skin cancer the first line of defense is to simply lop the thing off. You almost never get chemo with skin cancer unless it has progressed.

The current 5 year survival rate for pancreatic cancer detected early is 80%. So it's definitely an aggressive cancer even in the best practical scenarios.

Guess that's why he needed those reminders to not get "carried away". That there is a lot he doesn't know. Unfortunately, his cancer treatment was one of those times he did not remember.

He got all the money in the world, cheated (legally) the transplantation list, but was incapable to choose a therapy with a good chance to survive.

Even clever people, can be stupid.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/live-death-math-and-...

Is there any evidence Jobs actually wrote this or sent it to himself? This sounds like an inspirational fake-quote chain letter from the 1990s, the kind of thing that Snopes once specialized in debunking.

It's in a book published by his widow. Seems like a credible source for this information. https://books.apple.com/us/book/make-something-wonderful/id6...

I really think this sounds like him. He was always a poetic and philosophical dude, very much a hippie in more ways than one. Another commenter mentioned it coming up in a recent book by Laurene Powell Jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37812974

As a computer guy, he shouldn’t have been surprised to need input and not just generate output. ;)

Jobs wasn't really a "computer guy", he was a "marketing guy".

He is really more of a product vision guy. I believe his skills at marketing is a side effect of really believing in what he is trying to sell - which is what he had his team make.

The "really believing in what he is trying to sell" aspect is something that no one at Apple can currently pull off - the few Apple presentations I have seen over the years post-Jobs have all been wooden as hell.

>He is really more of a product vision guy.

Jobs didn't have a product, Wozniak had the product. Wozniak decided what the product could and couldn't do. Jobs marketed it. Without Woz, Jobs would be selling medical supplies and would very likely be a nobody.

Woz has little to do with the Mac, nothing to do with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Jobs also did more than found Apple. He also found NeXT, Inc. and Pixar.

>Woz has little to do with the Mac, nothing to do with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad

>Jobs also did more than found Apple. He also found NeXT, Inc. and Pixar.

This comment is totally putting the cart before the horse. Without Woz, Jobs would have been a nobody. If Jobs had never met Woz, we wouldn't even be having this conversation right now. There would have been no Apple, no NeXT and probably no Pixar. Woz had everything to do with what Apple became and without him there simply wouldn't be an Apple or a Jobs to discuss right now.

Given the nature of the text, the phrase “Sent from my iPad” reads a bit like the way “the word of the lord” etc is used to close a homily in a Catholic mass.

Didn’t quite lol, but chuckled.

*Edited for typo

It's also an apt closer for his thoughts on his own space in the history of man.

He doesn't grow food. He doesn't produce profound technology. He doesn't save lives. He is entirely dependent. But he made the iPad.

this made my day.

what a fucking legend he is.

edit: fuck all of you downvoters. fucking cunts of the universe. hahaha.

HN, what is happening to you?? :’(

Imo This stuff is not worldly and wise. It is stupidly obvious. Explicitly acknowledging your humility over ideas that everyone should understand without contemplation feels more like smugness at trying to make yourself seem more considered.

It was also sent to himself? Perhaps he has having trouble living as though these things are obvious, and sent himself a reminder because he realized he was spending too much time being worshipped to see things clearly?

Shrug

I would not be able to write such stuff with a straight face. Every human should be able to say the same. At best you’re saying he completely lost himself to hubris and was taking baby steps to approach something vaguely typical.

I've written reminders of virtues to myself. It's not that weird. You say you wouldn't write it with a straight face, which is basically saying that you judge him for it. To which I'd say, get over it; everyone gets to handle their stuff in their own way. He surely didn't intend for you to read this. I'm sure you've done things in private which others would cringe at as well, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do them.

Of course there's no way to know, but you may be a little too naive to think that he wasn't considering the fact that people would read this. And then his wife published it. If it's even real, it reminds me of Bill Gates buying himself a Netflix special to clean up his public persona. At least Bill saved some people from malaria.

Could be that he expected it to be public. I don't think it matters much to the question of whether judging it at a personal level is okay; the above commenter expressed their belief that _anyone_ doing this is worthy of judgment and I think that's reprehensible.

If your virtues include reminders that you’re not better than everyone else then I’m going to judge you as egotistical as well.

Presenting reasoning why you’re not special implies it requires reasoning to begin with and not self evident. And I think that’s shit

But I don’t really care either way at the end of the day, you’re right.

Maybe I am egotistical! If so, good thing I'm being introspective about it. Do you leave yourself reminders to be less judgmental?

It’s fine for it to simultaneously be bad that you’re egotistical; good that you’re introspective about it; and net all kind of underwhelming imo. This particular set of notes does not communicate a strong self of self awareness.

That is, the grand scale of jobs’ observations suggest to me he thinks he is being worldly despite his success, not being humble because he is in fact not better than others. Like no shit Steve, you did not invent math. A lot of your shit you just lifted from xerox frankly.

Snark aside. Humility that is self evident to oneself is different than humility that one asserts themself into. Steve is still just some guy even if he single handedly invented all those things that he did not. He is not merely human because of this.

This isn’t the kind of thing someone writes if they truly believe deep down that they are equal to others. Even if it argues just that.

If you were one of the most successful people on the planet and at the head of a company that deified you, you could probably do with a memento mori as well.

I really don’t think so. People should be shamed for needing these things, not praised for doing them in spite of their success.

Note to self: I'm not actually a god.

Yeah that's how the email reads to me as well. A person who's had so much pressure on them to create amazing things that he's blaming himself for not being god-like.

It is interesting to me that he decided to use email in this way

I'm left wondering if he wrote this under the influence of psychedelics, and if this was an attempt to capture/maintain the insight that he feared he would forget.

Good point. It chimes well with the fleeting realisation that "we're all one" you get from psychedelics

I write a lot of emails to myself as a somewhat time sensitive note taking approach

I am my species, and so is each one of us.

The comedic effect of that pseudo I-am-14-and-this-is-deep bullshit ending with "Sent from my iPad" is not to be overlooked.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:

"Don't be snarky."

So he wasn't a Libertarian.

The problem is that no one is a libertarian - not even libertarians. The problem is everyone else realizes this, but libertarians don't.

And that appropriate twitter quote:

A: "In your own words, how would you describe libertarians?"

B: "House cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."

You must be using the most extreme and uncharitable definition of "libertarian" imaginable, because nobody I know that calls themselves libertarian thinks they are 100% independent. The very notion is just absurd. This strikes me as the same vein as people saying "nobody is a communist, because everybody believes their toothbrush is their private property"

These people do exist. I have a cousin who actually believes taxes are theft (when pressed he will walk it back to "extortion").

He believes he does not owe the government anything, and neither does anyone else. He also gets mad at the roads not being well maintained. These two things cannot go together.

I have an uncle on the other side of the family which is similar.

In the rare cases I have sparred with them on social media, I helpfully advised they investigate the rugged beauty of Antarctica.

Your comment is correct in isolation, but you're shifting the definition from people in general[1] to "governments" which means despite being true, it is not a refutation to the above.

Previously we were talking about people believing they are completely independent, that is not relying on another person for anything or thinking that they are purely an island.

What you are describing are beliefs about governments. Anarcho-capitalist Libertarians do believe as you say about governments, but they absolutely don't believe they are independent of other people. They believe they are very dependent on other people and on societies in general, especially markets. They advocate for a completely free market, free of government interference, but this is very different than believing they are entirely self-sufficient without other humans.

[1]: See "full text of the letter" from TFA. It's quite clear that he is talking about humanity in general, not governments. (https://officechai.com/stories/steve-jobs-email-to-self/)

Supposedly, the government that currently exists appears to tax the entire US population for a number of things, one of those things being infrastructure. This is widely known and not a thing that just came into existence within the bounds of this comment.

So logically, is it hypocritical to assume the government is not doing its duty when it taxes the entire population, and the outcome is poorly maintained roads?

If that's hypocritical, then all communists and socialists are more extreme versions since the vast majority of them live in capitalist societies and do nothing to live their ideals.

Why is the choice between "libertarianism" and communism/urbanism/collectivism.

Maybe some people don't want their immediate way of life dictated by those around them and would prefer some agency and freedom in their daily lives while still wanting to help others.

We need a way to help people without those doing the helping/net taxpayers having their way of lives destroyed. (a guy with a SFH not having a 300 room apartment build right next to him, a guy wanting to drive his personal vehicle not having 75% of his roads redirected for bus/bike lanes and can only drive his even numbered license plate on tu/thur) etc. I don't see this happening, so until then, complete opposition.

This is an absurdly uncharitable description and sounds like a bad caricature.

There are lots of good criticisms of libertarianism, I don't see a reason to resort to something like this.

We live in an era of refinement, not innovation. ~Marco Pierre White

my own version:

I don't grow any food, but I spend time foraging fruit, and look at places where perfectly good food is wasted (markets), I haven't spent money since 8 months currently (bought some rice & soap early in the year)

I did't buy clothes since decades, only shoes rarely, but most of the time I'm barefoot or in flip flops

I don't speak a lot, nor use maths anymore, but respect these inventions

I don't really like this society & laws, where many kind of excess are allowed at the expense of the environment and poor people

I'm moved by naturals sounds and things

I haven't used medical attention in decades, but respect for the medical people, it just feels like it's overconsumed like many other things

I didn't invent any tech, and use it as least as possible

I don't like humanity, especially the recent centuries, by far the worst species on the planet, just after mosquitoes

I regret very few things in life, but here is one that nags me with particular poignancy. Back in the day, I was a poor college student in a third-world country, and I was traveling from college to visit my parents. Public transport didn't and doesn't work in said third-world country, so I went to the highway to try to catch a ride. There were many college students standing by the highway, and at 2:00 AM in the night, I was still there. I left that place at 9:00 AM the next day, when a guy in a wore-down moskvich picked me up. Long story short, a few hundred kilometers later, he made a stop to take a piss, and then he wanted me to ...well, you guessed it. I ran away. It was okay for me to run away, I know. But the thing that bothers me so badly to this day is that I ran away because I was a cynic, and assumed that the guy wanted something ill from me. Truth is, I would have enjoyed giving that guy what he wanted, it's in my nature, and he well deserved it. Now, instead of a spicy memory, I have a cautionary tale about a cynic college student.

While I would not "deify" Jobs in anyway, I try to live by the following:

- Humans have achieved a lot of things. Despite our faults, we are a wonderful species.

- By the above, I shall not be a cynic, and I will believe more easily that a person is good or does something good than the opposite, i.e. that a person is acting in self-interest and in my detriment.

- I will try to do things in life that benefit others, by whichever stick I decide to measure that benefit.

To be clear, you're talking about a guy wanting you to exchange a sexual favor for him giving you a ride right? Or am I totally misreading this? If that's the case, I wouldn't classify you running away as you being cynical. You might have just wanted to not play the odds of getting into a situation that could have escalated into physical coercion. That's very sensible.

Or are you saying you were actually attracted to said guy and you'd be ok with it? Then your story makes sense, but it's still an odd one to pick given how extreme most people would say it is.

To be honest, I'm very confused by this comment. I love Hacker News lol.

This is crazy. Did you establish up front that you were exchanging sexual services for a ride?

Did you give any cues or indication that it’s what you wanted?

If not, this guy is going around picking up hitchhikers, and potentially giving them the option of being stranded in a third world country or giving him sexual services.

And your major regret is that you didn’t give him what he wanted? He could have killed you or given you a disease.

It is the rule of the road[1], you know.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diFDBNNmnnU

Beautiful

Reply on news.ycombinator.com