How Steve Jobs developed his brain

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

One of the qualities that Jobs was famous for was the ability to see things that others do not see. We will describe below how he succeeded and what technique he used to develop his brain.

Recently there was a new book about Steve Jobs, Becoming Steve Jobs. In it, the authors tell about events from the life of Jobs, and you will hear about many of them for the first time.

Perhaps most remembered the fact that the current head of Apple Tim Cook offered Jobs a part of his liver. To Cook's offer, Jobs angrily refused, saying that he would never do it. And although after a while he nevertheless agreed to a transplant operation, many decided that his refusal was due to the fact that the religion he preaches (Buddhism) prohibits such interventions in his body.

We are unlikely to find out about the real reasons for Jobs' refusal. However, his adherence to oriental practices also influenced the way he trained his brain.

Jobs often practiced mindfulness meditation to reduce stress and clarify thinking.

Biographer Walter Isaacson quoted Jobs in the book:

If you just sit and observe, you will see how limitless your thinking is. If you try to calm him down, it will only get worse. But over time, thinking itself calms down and you learn to control it.

At this moment, intuition wakes up and you see everything around much more clearly than you saw before.

Jobs describes a type of meditation practiced by Zen Buddhists and Taoists. He has been doing it for many years. What's more, he popularized the practice so much that companies like Target, Google, and Ford began teaching their employees to meditate on an ongoing basis.

And while the idea of corporate meditation sounds rather strange, there is still something about it.

Jeffrey James, a journalist and editor of the site, was able to chat with Jobs about meditation long before his death. This is what he said it looked like technique practiced by Steve Jobs:

Sit in a quiet place. You may want to place a pillow under you to make you more comfortable. Take a few deep breaths.
Close your eyes and listen to your inner monologue. Your brain will cycle through incoherent events that happened recently: TV shows, books you read, conversations with friends. Do not try to interfere with this.
Instead, calmly move from thought to thought. Make it a ritual and spend five minutes every day this way.

Over time (a week or two), you will learn to control your inner monologue, and then you can move on to more advanced practice:

Now that you hear incoherent thoughts in your head, try to make them quieter and smoothly move away from them.
Freeing the brain, focus its attention on the sounds, smells, and sensations in the body around you. You may start to feel differently the wind on your skin or the sound of the refrigerator running. This is a sign that you are doing everything right.
Another sign that you are doing everything right is that time in meditation flies by.

I wrote about a similar technique of meditation here, and it was really useful.

Frankly, over time, I stopped meditating for one reason. The first few weeks you do not see the result, then it finally comes, and you learn to control thoughts in meditation, to focus on various rustles and smells. But after a while, progress slows down again, thereby killing the motivation to do it further.

I did the wrong thing by stopping meditation, and lately I have been looking for a new incentive to start doing it. And knowing that Jobs also practiced a similar technique is a great motivation to get started.