The 20 Minute Break – Listen To Your Body Rhythms
You have probably heard that your body has rhythms. Perhaps you even know what circadian rhythm is and that it changes depending on your environment. But have you heard about ultradian rhythms? Probably not, but you have most certainly felt them. Ultradian rhythms are responsible for your productivity, attention, memory, stress, health, and much more. Unfortunately very few people know about ultradian rhythms. Not being aware of these rhythms can lead to psychological and physical problems.
Body rhythms
- Infradian rhythm - a regular, repeating pattern with a cycle which is longer than 24 hours, for example, the monthly menstrual cycle.
- Circadian rhythm – often referred to as body clock and has roughly 24-hour cycle. This rhythm is adjusted by environmental cues such as daylight. For example, when you travel to a different time zone, your body clock adjust to the new environment after a few days.
- Ultradian rhythm – recurrent period or cycles repeated throughout the day.
What are ultradian rhythms?
Ultradian rhythms are natural body cycles that occur throughout the day every 90-120 minutes. Dr. Ernest Lawrence Rossi, a psychology researcher introduced the concept of ultradian rhythms, or biological cycles of rest and activity that regulate physical and mental health (1). Approximately every 90-120 minutes, the mind and body give us clues signaling the need for rest and change in physical and mental activity. Ignoring these signals may lead to fatigue, stress, and ultimately physical (psychosomatic) illness.
Ultradian rhythms signals
Think about your typical day, are you able to stay productive, focused, and energized all the time? I am sure that you can recall moments from your day when your concentration decreased, your productivity vanished, and your mind began to wonder while you felt like stretching or taking a break. If you have been sitting or concentrating longer than 90-120 minutes (depending on your rhythm) you will begin to experience signals sent by your body telling you that you need to take a break. Think if any of these ultradian rhythm signals seem familiar to you:
- Sharp drop in concentration, performance, and productivity.
- You feel like you need to stretch, move around, or just take a break.
- You begin to yawn and lose your concentration.
- Your mind becomes distracted with fantasies or daydreaming.
- Physical discomfort expressed through tension or fatigue.
- You start browsing websites, check Facebook and Twitter instead of doing work.
- You begin to make careless errors in spelling, typing, or counting.
- You begin to forget things or frequently experience “on the tip of your tongue effect”
- You need to urinate.
Unfortunately most people do not recognize any of these signals as something that they need to take care of and continue their work. In my experience, the feeling that I need to urinate or that my lower back hurts too much is one of the strongest signals telling me that I need to take a break.
Ultradian rhythms are usually unnoticed and yet people talk about them all the time. Here are some popular posts related to ultradian rhythms without mentioning these rhythms directly.
- How Sitting All Day Is Damaging Your Body and How You Can Counteract It
- The Pomodoro Technique Fights Deadline Anxiety with a Timer
- Sitting Is Killing You
What happens when you override your natural rhythm
Urgent and important tasks can easily override natural mind-body rhythms. A simple email or a phone call can shift your attention away from your body’s signals. Ultradian rhythms are flexible and adaptable to real world demands. However, this adaptability comes at a price of stress. The more we ignore our rhythms and continue to work without taking a break, the more likely we are to experience stressful effects.
When you ignore your natural body rhythms, your body releases stress hormones, which give you an energetic boost. You feel more alert and enthused. You may even feel good, excited, or intent for a short period of time because your fatigue and pain are masked by your body’s natural opiates (beta-endorphins) (1).
When the adrenaline runs out and your body decreases resilience, your body begins to cry for help because it needs to replenish and rebalance itself. If you still continue to ignore your body’s signals, you might begin to experience the ultradian stress syndrome. Symptoms of ultradian stress syndrome include: laziness, manic or selfish behavior, anger flashes, short-temper, irritability, tension and hostility (1).
When people continuously ignore their body rhythms during the day, three outcomes can happen:
- Need for artificial stimulants such as caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol.
- Fatigue that makes you tired and sleepy (often occurs during studying).
- Irritation, discomfort, stress, anger, and frustration.
At work when people begin to lose concentration they get up to drink a cup of coffee or they go for a smoke. I am not so sure that it is the nicotine that makes people feel better as much as it is a short break that they take from their work.
In the library you can often see people shifting their attention and eventually putting their head on the table and taking a nap. I often write my work in the library and I see people ignoring their ultradian rhythms all the time. People begin to lose their attention, they start stretching for a few seconds and then they force themselves to continue their work. It takes a few attempts for the “mind-body mechanism” to disconnect a person from their work and put him or her to sleep.
Prolonged experience of ultradian stress syndrome can lead to poor performance, bad memory, poor learning, emotional problems, psychosomatic illnesses, and even depression (1). In a nutshell, ignoring your ultradian rhythms leads to stress, and prolonged stress (distress) leads to psychological and physical problems.
How to take care of your ultradian rhythms
Ultradian rhythm is your mind-body’s signal to take break. This break can last from 10 to 20 minutes and can lead to renewed energy and improved performance.
1. Recognize the signals
Accept the fact that you need to take a break and rest every 90-120 minutes. It is only natural to listen to your rhythms and allow yourself a 10-20 minute break. Pay attention to your mental and physical signals. If you think that you are losing your concentration, you begin to check random websites, you feel like your energy is gone or you feel discomfort in your body, stop whatever you are doing, stand up, take a few steps away from your desk, and stand still for a moment. It is important to understand that this is not something that you have to do but rather something that you want to do.
2. Listen to yourself
Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Allow yourself to slip into a light state of relaxation and just enjoy the moment. Take a minute or two and just relax. Now, allow yourself to wonder and think of anything that your mind wants to think about. Do not analyze your thoughts even if you’ll begin to think about pink elephants. Just allow your mind to wonder in any direction.
The same rule applies to your body. Relax and allow your body to do whatever it feels life doing. If you feel like stretching, doing squats, walking, jumping, crying, laughing, doing pushups, lying down, rocking back and forth or just sitting down, then just do it without questioning your body. “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” – Friedrich Nietzsche.
Allow yourself to daydream, move any way you feel like moving or think about anything that you want to think about. Just let it happen. When you listen to yourself and you get out of the way, your self-regulation mechanism kicks in and you activate a healing response. Give yourself 10-20 minutes of relaxation. Your thoughts and your body motivation during your ultradian healing response can be different every time you take a break. Allow your unconscious mind to guide your thoughts and body movement, because it knows what you need the most in the moment.
3. Rejuvenation and Awakening
During the last few minutes of your ultradian healing response, feel the natural awaking, serenity and clarity. Once you open your eyes, you will be much more alert and energized.
Important notes
- There may be a time during your break when you’ll feel like taking a nap. If you can, do it. Do not force yourself to do anything during your break unless you really feel like it.
- To begin with, you can use a timer on your computer or a cell phone to remind yourself that you need to take a break. I use TimeOut for Mac to remind myself that I need to take a break. Sometimes I let the software remind me and sometimes I take a break myself.
Benefits of following your ultradian rhythms
I have practiced listening to my ultradian rhythms for more than 3 years. A simple break at the right time keeps me productive and energized throughout the day. When I feel an ultradian rhythm signal, I usually get up, close my eyes and listen to myself. Often my body tells me to stretch, do squats or just move. This is normal because I sit a lot while I am writing or reading.
By tuning into my natural body rhythms, I have been able to maintain good mental and physical health, higher productivity, reduced stress, and improve my well-being. If you would like to also learn more about tuning into your unconscious wisdom and working with your body, you can read about The Key Method.
Bibliography
[1] The Twenty Minute Break: Reduce Stress, Maximize Performance, Improve Health and Emotional Well-Being Using the New Science of Ultradian Rhythms by Ernest Lawrence Rossi
The 20 Minute Break – Listen To Your Body Rhythms Visual Summary
Intuition from the future
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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 1. 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 notices two instanced 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.” 2.
“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” [^Isaacson].
There are several possible explanation for these revelations about his future:
- 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.
- Chivers, T. (2009, November 12). The 10 weirdest physics facts, from relativity to quantum physics. Telegraph. ↩
- Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩
Steve Jobs’s Purpose
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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 1. 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 2. 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 remember 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 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.
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 3
Think Different
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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 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 Job’s 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. Job’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 create just 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.
Steve Job’s Motivation
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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 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 1. 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, 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 1.
When Steve Jobs had to take a medical leave due to his health problems, Tim Cook gave an inspiration 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
- Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩
Spirituality
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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 1.
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 2.
Jobs emphasized that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma 3. 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.
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.
The Power of Focus
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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:
- Set priorities,
- Aim your laser attention on them,
- 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 simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options”1. 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 1
- Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩
The Reality Distortion Field
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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.“ 1.
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.
In the presence of Steve Jobs, reality sometimes became flexible and he was able to convince anyone of practically anything. This effect wearied 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.”
- Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩
Keep moving forward
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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 became below $15.
None of this discouraged Jobs from continuing to push for distinctive, even distracting, new design of his products. He had a vision of how he wants 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 1
- Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩
Reinvent yourself and your vision
This post is part of the full article about The Psychology of Steve Jobs.
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.
“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 1
- Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩