Steve Jobs & Rainbows
Steve Jobs was sharing with me this week an incredible metaphor about rainbows.
It wasn't a direct conversation but… I'm reading the book Make Something Wonderful which is a curation of Steve Jobs transcripts from speeches and his writings during his life and his journey of building one of the greatest institutions of all time, Apple.
Jobs gave a Commencement Speech to high schoolers at Palo Alto High School in 1996 and was talking about rainbows:
The journey is the reward. People think that you've made it when you've gotten to the end of the rainbow and got the pot of gold. But they're wrong. The reward is in the crossing of the rainbow. That's easy for me to say - I got the pot of gold (literally). But if you get to the pot of gold, you already know that that's not the reward, and you go looking for another rainbow to cross.
Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.
The two endpoints of everyone's rainbow are birth and death… No human alive knows what happens to us after our death. Some believe this, others that, but no one really knows at all… the thought of mortality will somehow wound you. For me it's the opposite: to know my arc will fall makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky…
My 3 Biggest takeaways from Job's rainbow metaphor
1. THE JOURNEY - Literally all of the greats focus on the process. (i.e. the journey) It's not about the pot of gold. It's about the 4,000 weeks we get to live if we're fortunate to live that long.
2. POT OF GOLD - Jobs had the literal pot of gold and he is sharing with all of us it's not about the pot of gold. It's about the arc. Mother culture so badly wants to blind us into believing it’s the pot of gold and go down the rabit hole of consumption.
3. MORTALITY - Jobs used mortality to give him a sense of urgency and boldness to be the best version of himself. He used mortality to light the sky while he had his moment on earth.
Birth and death are the bookends of life and Jobs gives us a great metaphor of rainbows to focus on blazing the sky during our moment on earth.
Onward,
Matt