Steve Jobs' biography has been out for a while. Amongst the hype about the book, I was engrossed in other books and had never got the urge to read it, that is, until I read the cover story of the August issue of Wired. The article summarizes reactions to Steve Jobs’ biography from two camps of people, the camp of the acolytes and that of the rejectors. For the former, Steve Jobs’ success lies in his uncompromising strive for perfection and sticking firmly to his vision and goals. Jobs never minced his words towards his employees who were never perfect in his eyes. The biography told a lot of stories of this visionary being rude to his employees, calling them “shitheads who suck”, and not following social standards and norms. His brashness extended to those who were close to him, those who waited on him and even his family. The latter camp, that of the rejectors, is repelled by this side of the Jobs’ personality. What they see from Jobs’ personal story is a man alienated from his family, a jerk sometimes, a father that failed at parenting and had to resort to a biography for his kids to get to know him.
The two camps are composed of mainly male CEOs who either want to emulate Jobs (the acolytes) or who learned a cautionary lesson from his story and decide to be a better father than Jobs(the rejectors). But the article really struck a chord with me when it says, “The divergence in these reactions is a testament to the two deep and often contradictory hungers that drive so many of us today: We want to succeed in the world of work, but we also want satisfaction in the realm of home and family”. Recently, I have been thinking about my job, my after-work endeavor (namely English study), my family life and how I should balance them. One day about two weeks ago, I came home grumpy because of a disagreement with a coworker. I regretted taking on this new job and quitting my previous, more comfortable work-from-home job. I thought, if I had stayed in my previous company, at least I would have more time and energy for my little project of accent reduction. I couldn’t recover from this despondent feeling which was just gnawing at me the whole evening, until my husband said to me something like this: your work is not your life; the worst thing you can do is to carry your work back home and let it ruin your life with your family. I realized I was taking my job and my accent reduction too seriously and haven’t been making much effort at being a good mother and a good wife. Since I started working on my accent, I hadn’t been as devoted to my kids as before. Even when I was playing with them, I was often not mentally there with them, peeking my iPhone or reading a book, or listening to the radio. (We laughed but were a little shocked when my daughter, at 3 and half, out of nowhere, said to us when I was reading on my phone in the car and Daddy had the iPhone Pandora on, “you guys sure love your iphones!”)
My enlightenment from the article came from two rejectors. A female CEO suggested one personal lesson from Jobs’ life: “If he could do Apple and Pixar—two multibillion-dollar companies—then I should be able to handle one business and also my family”. I thought: if this female CEO can handle one business and her family, I should be able to coast along my non-executive and non-challenging job and handle my family as well. Handling my family would be like managing my relationship with a group of people, which reminds me what NewVoice recently said to me, every relationship needs working on/nurturing (she used the word 经营，the exact word Cha-Cha had used when she talked about her philosophy of friendship). I do need to work on my relationships with my mother, my husband and my kids, and make a more conscious effort at it.
Another rejector said, “if you’re going to fail at building something, fail at building the fucking iPad. Don’t fail at building children.” Although I don’t totally agree with him as I don’t think Steve Jobs failed at building his children, I do agree that building children is a more important job than my job job. If I fail at my current job, I can always change to another company and start over. But my job at home is of much higher stakes. You can’t choose who your parents or your kids are. There is no going back in time to make up for damages you have done to your relationships. To a coworker, you can always say, it’s purely professional; please don’t take it personal. But relationships at home, are nothing but personal. If the first rejector’s inspiration is telling us life and work are two parallel worlds very similar to each other, this second rejector is contrasting the two and telling us which should be our priority one.
This article left me with two decisions. The first one is to completely unplug myself from work and MYSJ in the evenings and weekends when the kids are awake. The second is to read Steve Jobs. At the end of the article, it suggested that everyone’s takeaway from the book has been different. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs, which usually says more about themselves and little about Jobs.” So I suppose reading Steve Jobs will be more of a self-discovery process, a process to find out whether I am an acolyte or a rejector, or a little bit of both.
A cute conversation between my husband and my daughter last night:
(Note: My daughter watches Dinosaur Train, The Backyardigans, Yo Gabba Gabba, etc on Netflix.)
Daddy(turning on TV): Tonight is bath night. You can only watch one episode. Choose carefully.
Daughter: Daddy, which one is “Carefully”?
