I used the mouse on my computer to navigate the online commands for watching the interviews with Steve Jobs. Thanks Steve, for the idea of using a mouse! I am a terrible typist.
What an arrogant fool, however. Steve Jobs, like so many people in this world, could have beaten his cancer issues. He had the means to have it removed when it was tiny, first detected and able to be small enough to successfully take it out of his body completely. Steve Jobs could still be here today if it were not for his mind type of unusual arrogance. I call this effect the "David Theory." I have mentioned the "David Theory" in some of my posts in the past. I am sure this theory has an official name out there in the world of psychology. I gave it my own name when I discovered its effects a long time ago. I nicknamed it the "David Theory." We will get to that story, next. However, first we must chit chat a little bit about Steve Jobs and the idea of transparency.
Yesterday I wrote a post about transparency. I wrote about some stuff that becomes a gray area in revealing what ought not to be revealed. I wrote about the idea of comparing privacy versus transparency. Steve Jobs felt compelled to tell the story about his long, non-relationship with his biological father. He also felt compelled to tell how he personally felt about that private relationship. Why did he share that information with the general public, who has no business knowing that stuff?
Steve Jobs biological father has no business being in my personal line of informational sight. Steve Jobs father is not and should not be a part of my life travels. His father is a complete non-issue in my life movements. Steve placed him there rudely. He assumed that revealing this failed relationship was something I needed to know. He included it in the interviews he did about his business life. He got real transparent about that private issue. We have come to believe that technology should reveal the private stuff we all carry in the lives we travel. Steve missed this error. Some discretion, some restraint needs to be exercised about the stuff that is private to us all. Every single one of us has some private stuff in our lives that has no business being made public. We are losing the respect for privacy. I believe the world of technology is helping to increase that movement to destroy our desire to keep some stuff private. Steve was one of the key catalyst that profited greatly from that movement.
Steve Jobs stands in a long line of influential people whom have infused a pattern of 'transparency beliefs' that has tilted the opinion that 'all is fair' in the world of personal exposure. Steve comes from the information sector, a key driver in the age of information, the technology machine that believes in the right to gather all the information you can. Steve's influence in that sector was huge! Yet in his bigger than life influence, I discovered something interesting about Steve Jobs in those interviews. He is just as much the arrogant fool I had witnessed in the previous experiences I have had about reading how he managed the relationships with the people in his private and business life. I already knew about his rudeness from previous stories written about him. Steve walked right over the top of people, purposely. He admits that it was not pretty stuff. That does not excuse it. Steve admits that he did not just walk on people, he crushed them with pleasure. The examples are not hard to find. He included some of the best ones in his interviews.
Steve Jobs arrogance was high on the charts of life. That is the truth. At least he admitted it. It cost him his life, however. It was one of the best traits for him to build the enormous financial life he constructed. It was also the trait that took him away from living that life. Ask his children this question...would they rather have him or the money still remaining on this earth? You know what they would choose. Steve's arrogance took that away from them. This is exactly what 'wrong' transparency does. It creates a sense of exposure that does not need to be reported. It drives a rudeness through the thoughts of millions of people. It fosters an 'ugly' that we all use to chip away from the few beautiful characteristics we each possess. Steve Jobs used the wrong personality traits to decide to ignore his growing cancer. He did so against the advice of some really informed experts and professionals. He tried to carve out new ideas for untested treatments for cancer control instead of using the 'carving out correctly method' and removing it completely when it was small and doable. It cost his children their dad. I do not see how they were tops on his chart of consideration. This is a prime example of the "David Theory."
Privacy works wonders in this area of life. Most reading this post might feel a bit uncomfortable about reading this kind of slant about Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, Steve placed it into his book for you to read, first hand. He just wants you to pay for this private information in another way. He never stopped marketing himself. He has passed on and is still marketing himself. He arranged to have his book released after his death. Think about it. Do not get caught up in the menagerie of information spills. Some stuff is better left alone. I am violating that process right now in my own post. It is such a great and catastrophic example, why not?
Steve allowed his arrogance to forget about restraint. I happen to be doing the same thing right now. He was successful in the business world and we tend to believe that the manageability of his personal life was excellent, too. It was not. He failed just like his biological father failed. He was too weak inside to admit he could have worked on fixing that relationship. He had the opportunity to begin that work and skipped right past it. He described in great detail how he skipped making that move. If it was a part of his business plan, he would have fixed it in a heart beat. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with his business life. Therefore, it was not high enough up on the chart of importance. Steve tells the truth, why can't we? He failed in family life. He is gone when they need him the most.
I saw a television commercial the other day. It shows a grandfather reaching out to hug a "just-learning-to-walk-child" coming to him. Only to see that the grandfather was a 'mirage image' that the small child walked right through because the grandfather had passed on. Ironically, it was a cancer commercial. It was trying to wake us all up about how important other things in life are, like family respect. What a great example of the "David Theory."
Page two.
Steve Jobs got trapped by the very same characteristics that helped him win big in the business world. The things that he learned to trust to build a huge business empire became the very same things that brought him down. At the root of all of those things was his arrogance. I call this scenario the "David Theory."
During a short period of time in my career I had hired this person named David to help deliver furniture in my furniture store. He was a great employee. He was not especially bright but he had some very endearing qualities. Those qualities helped him earn the trust of many good customers. He was good to have around the homes and lives of those customers. It was an asset advance to my business model to have David represent my business affairs on each delivery he performed. That was many years ago. David and I parted business ways nearly 20 years ago. He is now all grown up and has raised a family of his own. I still see him once in awhile and he is as delightful to visit with as he ever was in the past. He is a special person in my life. His work experience with me helped me to develop what I call the "David Theory."
David had some very good qualities. He also had a 'blockade' developed around some of his other 'not-so-good' qualities. I had noticed that any time I gave instructions to David about anything that represented authority movements, he seemed to block them out. It was a puzzling process. He had such a great attitude and such a wonderful life perspective that this once-in-awhile blank out process was a little bit irritating. I decided to give it a little more attention and begin to help him modify this disturbance. I started to work more closely with him to see what I could do to improve his overall work characteristics. It seemed the more I applied authority the more he blanked out the instructions. I noticed that even when I had relayed some specific delivery instructions from a customer to be passed on to the delivery crew, he would blank them out when I shared them with him. He would miss those instruction so politely, however?
His inability to follow instructions became a noticeable issue. It was beginning to interfere with the quality of his work. I began to work harder on helping him to see and understand how important this area of his performance was to the total level of work he was held to uphold. It grew worse. I became puzzled. He was such a great guy, with tons of wonderful personality but had such a great blockage for following simple instructions. I could not see any other areas in his characteristics that would suggest an attention deficit process. I was puzzled.
Then one day we did a delivery to one of the local school math teachers. He was a regular customer of my furniture store and purchased a lot of items over the years. His house was outfitted with products from my store. I decided to stop by that math teachers house after work that day to see how the new furniture looked in the family room. We had a great conversation. During the conversation, the math teacher described how he and the school district had to work extra hard on helping David get through some stuff at school. He described how the school had to eventually file a restraining order on David's father, who was abusive and frequented the school with personal issues involving his relationship with David. The math teacher described how much difficulty he had with offering basic instruction to David, who the math teacher felt was "sharp as a tack." Davids resulting behavior confused the math teacher a great deal. That information was good light for me. After I left that experience, I worked on thinking a bit differently about how to approach David's performance issues.
I began the work on trying to lift David into the position of authority, not me. I would constantly ask him for advice on delivery stuff. I played like I was out of the loop of good thinking. I began to use David as the director of delivery affairs. I had him write the procedures to improve the delivery of our furniture store efforts. David was superb in operating our improved delivery efforts. He definitely objected to any sense of authority. My suspicions were correct. I felt that David was mentally shutting off anything that sounded like authority. He in fact, could not see how he was doing this step. It had become a life saving step that David had learned to develop and to trust in his efforts to become a good citizen with good qualities. David had learned how to tune out any messages that came from someone of authority. It saved his personal image from the abusive treatments he was raised to endure.
The very thing that saved David in his up-bringing, was the very same thing that was destroying his growth opportunities. David was not able to discern the difference. The 'tune-out' techniques he developed to endure the abuse became the same techniques he subconsciously used to manage other parts of his life travels. He came to respect and trust those development techniques. They worked well for what he needed to have done. He learned how to acquire their methods in subconscious ways. He did not even know what he was doing to protect how he dealt with authority in life.
I nicknamed this effect as the "David Theory." I kept that nickname under my breath for many years. I discovered it was apparent to be able to witness this type of theory inside the process of almost every single life I encountered. The "David Theory" is evident in the life of almost everyone. The things that we grow to use to protect us from some of the personal ills we must endure in life are the very same things that restrict us from moving on to the next plateau of success. We all have some form of the "David Theory" running loose in our lives without us recognizing it. We are not different from David. Neither was Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs used his arrogance to gain confidence to do amazing things. It became his 'trusted' lead characteristic. It is also the very same thing that caused him to avoid immediate surgery to remove the tiny piece of single spot cancer that eventually grew and spread to take his life away. He got trapped easily into the "David Theory." Even Steve Jobs did not immediately recognize this effect. Smart people have the same challenges David had. In fact, I am participating in it right now. I write in a post on my blog about practicing restraint, look at yesterday's post, to refrain from passing on private information in a free and careless fashion. Then I tell you about a delivery guy and his troubled characteristics for dealing with his abusive father. Guilty. We all do it. I am not sure it is a good thing to promote. Some information in life needs to remain private. Technology does not promote that kind of process. Rather, it promotes just the opposite.
To those who might believe I have also violated Steve Jobs in a wrong way shortly after his passing, not true. Steve did this all by himself. I am only repeating what he said about himself, publicly. He requested this kind of information to be gathered and shared with the public knowing full well he was soon going to meet his end. He manufactured these private nature reports within the halls of his mind and family structure, promoted them to be included in a money making release of his new book which he instructed to be on the stands after his death. Do not blame me for reporting the same actions Steve publicly promoted. Blame me for telling you about David. That was wrong.
I still suggest we all practice a little more restraint on the idea of passing information around so freely.
Until next time...
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