Steve Jobs’s Real Genius : The New Yorker.
I’ve posted several stories about Steve Jobs. Well, I’m typing this on my MacBook Air while my iPhone is charging. His life had an impact on mine.
Some of the qualities I admired about Steve were his open admission to having taken LSD and how that experience shaped him (name another CEO who’s gone public with that information!), his practice of Zen, and his love of good design.
Here, Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers) writes about Jobs’ dark side — his perfectionism — and puts his gift into historical context.
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs – NYTimes.com.
Moving story about Steve told by someone who met him as an adult and was close to him the rest of his life, Mona Simpson, his sister, who’s a novelist.
This is a great character sketch of someone mainly presented to us through the media. Fascinating individual.
What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really? | NeuroTribes.
Great article by Steve Silberman (I have subscribed to his blog and follow him on Twitter — great find). I like reading about Steve Jobs, but even better is this simple, clear description of why we meditate:
Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Using the mind to watch the mind, and ultimately to change how the mind works, is known in cognitive psychology as metacognition. Beneath the poetic cultural trappings of Buddhism, what intensive meditation offers to long-term practitioners is a kind of metacognitive hack of the human operating system (a metaphor that probably crossed Jobs’ mind at some point.) Sitting zazen offered Jobs a practical technique for upgrading the motherboard in his head.
The classic Buddhist image of this hack is that thoughts are like clouds passing through a spacious blue sky. All your life, you’ve been convinced that this succession of clouds comprises a stable, enduring identity — a “self.” But Buddhists believe this self this is an illusion that causes unnecessary suffering as you inevitably face change, loss, disease, old age, and death. One aim of practice is to reveal the gaps or discontinuities — the glimpses of blue sky —between the thoughts, so you’re not so taken in by the illusion, but instead learn to identify with the panoramic awareness in which the clouds arise and disappear.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 