No Thanks

Given the freakishly small number of times I’ve ever searched online for anything related to Steve Jobs, I’m not quite sure how this Jony Ive video of him reflecting on lessons he learned from Jobs found its way into my feed. Maybe it’s fate, or maybe it’s a version of the Jungian principle that everything will feel like fate until you make the unconscious conscious, this time adapted for Google’s algorithm. The last 6 or 7 years have been an exercise in painfully awakening to that realization, or at least having the opportunity to do so. There are widespread claims of having unplugged from the Matrix and yet the hero worship and the fundraising campaigns remain, making the Buddhist sage Lin Chi’s 9th century advice of “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” even more prescient today.

Anyway. I ended up watching it given that the topic was focus and that’s an area in which I have a great deal of work left to do. In my more recent experience, the path appears not from saying yes but from saying no, and historically I’ve probably never hated a word more than I did that one. As he seems to be in all things, Ive is concise here and the salient point on focus takes about a minute to listen to. But the real knife between the ribs is Jobs’ admonition to him that Ive hadn’t given up anything he loved to make room for what he was focusing on. That he needed to let go of things he woke up in the morning thinking were the best idea he’d ever heard of. I’m the sort of person who has maybe 15 of those going at any given time, but increasingly over the last couple of months have finally started to admit that there’s really only one thing that I should be giving myself to moving forward. If you need a similar sort of kick in the pants I strongly suggest checking this out.