The Inconsistent Zen of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is one of the most influential Americans of all time. He is also one of the most important American businessmen ever to study Zen.
He studied Zen with a passion and meditated often. Steve Jobs had a Zen mentor who shaped his thinking. It is clear that Steve Jobs’Â immersion in the philosophy of Zen deeply affected his design choices. What is so maddening about Steve Jobs is the inconsistent way in which he applied Zen teachings to his personal life. Rarely has a life been so compartmentalized!
What is Zen?
I am not an authority on Zen. I ask those of you who are to correct any misstatements by me gently! VERY simply stated, Zen is a Japanese form of Buddhism. It emphasizes the value of meditation and intuition. Zen stresses intuition, compassion, and living in the moment. Zen emphasizes being aware of your oneness with the world and everything in it. It is a contradictory belief that it is both straightforward and deeply profound. As relates to my interpretation of Steve Jobs, I will emphasize the Zen concepts of oneness, compassion, and contentment.
Steve Jobs and Zen
Steve Jobs became fascinated by Zen at an early age. He was, in some ways, a tech nerd and, in other ways, a cultured and spiritual seeker. Particularly in his college and post-college years, Steve Jobs began to devote an important part of his intellectual and spiritual life to a quest to learn and incorporate the teachings of Zen. While at college, he and a friend, Daniel Kottke, read and studied about Zen. After college, Jobs, and Kottke went to India on a spiritual quest. Click here to listen to Kottke describe the trip. (You can start the clip  at 3:13  to begin the narrative about the trip.) Like the main character in The Razor’s Edge, he hoped to return to America and share what he had learned with others whose lives had not been transformed.
When Steve Jobs returned to California, he deepened his passion for Zen even as he was starting a technological and business revolution. It is clear Zen was more than the passing interest of a young mind. Steve Jobs began to take long meditative retreats at the first Zen monastery in the United States. He adapted his diet, his thinking, and his focus to center on Zen. He gained a mentor, a brilliant Japanese monk named Kobun Chino Otogawa
Steve Jobs’ Zen Mentor Kobun Chino Otogawa
who became an enormous influence on Jobs’ thinking. He served as a “spiritual advisor” to Apple. So close were the two men that Kobun Chino Otogawa performed Steve Jobs’ wedding ceremony in the middle of a national park.
Zen and Apple
Steve Jobs was not an inventor, per se. He was a revolutionary entrepreneur and marketer. It is obvious that he used his Zen teaching as he worked on creating the Apple product line. As a businessman, he rebelled against conventional wisdom. Standard business thinking is “Find out what the customer wants and give it to them.” Steve Jobs combined his intuition and Zen teachings to create a line of products that would revolutionize the way we work, study, communicate, and entertain ourselves. Three important precepts of Zen are simplicity, oneness, and integration. Jobs would need Steve Wozniak actually to invent the Macintosh computer. But Steve Jobs was able to share his vision of a computer that would be friendly and usable to people who weren’t computer nerds. The early Macintosh computers were remarkable in their simplicity of design and ease of use. Zen is both very complex and very simple. So are Apple products. Early PCs used blinking green display screens on which the user had to enter lots of text and remember long commands to make it work. The early Mac computers used a graphic user interface that made using the computer easy, intuitive, simple, and fun. When market leader Microsoft finally caught up with the graphic user interface, it was clear that it was not only a copy of the Macintosh system; it was a bad copy. The running joke was that Windows 98 was simply Macintosh ’91!
Consider the iPod. 
The technology that makes it work is incomprehensible to the average person. However, its design is simple, as is its use. It has no on/off switch. The iPod allows its user to teach it. The iTunes store becomes intuitive as it suggests ideas based on past preferences. As Steve Jobs worked with his designers, he urged them, badgered them, and challenged them to keep making design and use simpler even as the technology group more advanced. Apple products from the iPhone to the iPad have developed what some people call a cult-like following. The reason is clear. They work wonderfully well, and they are fun to use. Apple’s success represents the triumph of Steve Jobs’ ability to integrate Zen philosophy into everyday technology.
The Inconsistent Zen of Steve Jobs
What was so frustrating about Steve Jobs was that he seemed almost completely unable to integrate the teachings of Zen into his personal life and behavior. He often treated others without compassion, respect, or kindness. He had been put up for adoption as a child and deeply felt the sting of that rejection. His biological father abandoned his family. Steve Jobs got an early girlfriend pregnant, pressured her to get an abortion, and then abandoned her and the baby, forcing his child to go on welfare even as he built Apple. As a boss, he was harsh, often unkind, and punitive. Consider his decisions when Apple decided to go public. Steve Jobs drew the line about which of the original Apple employees would be offered founder’s stock. One of the people he refused to give stock to was employee number 12: Daniel Kottke. Remember him? He was Steve Jobs’ spiritual companion in college and then during his trip to India. He also worked side-by-side with Steve Wozniak and the design team on the first Macintosh computers. Steve Jobs refused to honor that work with stock given to the early employees. He never seemed in the slightest concerned that he had hurt someone who had been both an invaluable friend and an invaluable contributor to Apple’s success. (It bears noting that Steve Wozniak gave Daniel Kottke some of his stock at the time of the IPO) Steve Jobs was fired from Apple. Part of the reason he was fired was his inability to treat his coworkers and bosses with respect. Unlike Benjamin Franklin or Bill Gates, or Alexander Graham Bell, Steve Jobs had no connection to charity and no great civic involvement outside of his company. Those who were unaware of Steve Jobs’ personal connection to Zen would never have believed that he espoused Buddhism. He could be insulting, mean, dismissive, and at the same time overly sensitive to slights and insults directed at him.
Zen promotes a sense of oneness. Its practitioners seek gentleness and compassion. It emphasizes simplicity and easing the suffering of others. As the founder of one of the greatest companies in history, Steve Jobs used Zen in magnificent ways. He was just unable to integrate it into his personal behavior.
