JARED MEYER
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
—STEVE JOBS (Stanford Commencement Address)
Steve Jobs was what most people would call a perfectionist. The visionary Apple CEO was famous—or maybe infamous—for his unrelenting pursuit of perfection in all he created, down to every detail.
While this side of Jobs is well-known—his perfectionism in creating products that would enhance the lives of millions of people—there is another form of perfectionism we can ask about—perfectionism in creating oneself. We can call this kind of perfectionism moral perfectionism. As a way of looking at morality, it goes back to Aristotle, with one recent development being the theory put forward by Douglas Rasmusssen and Douglas Den Uyl.
How did Jobs shape up in pursuing this kind of perfectionism?
Moral perfectionism is about what’s good for humans—not good as defined by some outside command, by personal feelings, or by social consensus, but good as defined objectively by what actions lead humans to live flourishing lives.
Steve Jobs devoted his life to the intertwined tasks of improving his creations and himself. He grew in his visionary leadership throughout his career and, through personal development, was able to refine his perfectionism and use it to his benefit—and to the advantage of people all around the world.
Aspects of being a technical perfectionist and being a moral perfectionist are compatible, though the two things are not the same. Just as Jobs was never satisfied after the first prototype of a new Apple product, moral perfectionism does not treat perfection as a static quality to be achieved—one’s life is never simply “good enough.” Instead, perfection involves constantly striving, evaluating, and, in a real sense, becoming.
Steve Jobs had many faults, just as everyone else does. His arrogance led him to cut off productive relationships when they did not fit his immediate needs, and he was often abusive and ruthless to co-workers and competitors alike. Though I’m not trying to deify Jobs, I do want to look at his many strengths—as an entrepreneur, manager, and person—in order to provide a clear picture of what it means to pursue human flourishing.
Individualistic Perfectionism
Clearly not everyone has what it takes to be a successful tech entrepreneur, but can everyone become a successful moral entrepreneur? Both types of entrepreneurship require a commitment to reason, a desire to see things through to the end, and an inner drive to create something of value. However, whereas the tech entrepreneur’s success is solidly based on other people’s wishes (if no one else wants to use the product the business will cease to exist), the success of the moral entrepreneur is based on the self.
While the good is objective and based on human nature, perfection is not the same for everyone, because individual characteristics, such as Jobs’s tenacity, creativity, and attention to detail, determine each person’s different version of the good life. What is good for one person may not be good for another, even in similar situations. What we call “human flourishing” is not simply one-size-fits-all. As Rasmussen and Den Uyl put it, the good is agent-relative, not agent-neutral. What it means for one person to flourish is different from what this means for another person.
If you want to flourish, you don’t have to mimic Jobs’s business successes or his defining personal characteristics. As Jobs said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” A person’s life is their own. The successes of others may offer general pointers on how to live a good life, but copying other people and ignoring your own unique personality and situation won’t be enough—you have to find your own individual way to flourish.
As Henry Veatch pointed out, people possess a wide array of talents, interests, and personalities that lead to an individualized sense of the good. So the flourishing life is not just one kind of life. It’s not solely the life of the philosopher or the life of the tech engineer. It varies according to the individual’s own specific talents, interests, and personality.
There’s a wide range of lives people can live while still pursuing human flourishing. This should not be surprising since, after all, people are extremely diverse. So, when we say that what’s good for humans is objectively based on human nature, this shouldn’t limit how we can pursue human flourishing, more than the eighty-eight keys on a piano limit what songs can be played. Countless beautiful rhythm and melody combinations are still possible, and this holds true for human flourishing as well.
While there are certain goods that are integral to human flourishing (such as friendship, health, wisdom, or self-esteem), the ways individuals can balance these goods in accordance with their own distinctive talents, interests, and personalities are diverse.
Ethics Is Personal
The philosopher Immanuel Kant stated that his famous categorical imperative (a rule of conduct not dependent upon the achievement of any other end or purpose) was that you should, “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a Universal law of Nature.”
However, the central aim of ethics should not be providing impersonal by-the-book rules for everyone to follow. That would create a very detached outlook on morality, leading ethics to lose its relevance and meaning to individual humans’ lives.
But, since human flourishing is something we can know and strive to achieve, it can be universalized. In other words, the possibility of knowing that some specific action or value is good for yourself is common to all people. These values provide a basis for your conduct, but they do not have to provide the basis for every person’s conduct. Diverse people do, and should, have different correct responses to situations—we’re all human beings, but we’re also all individuals. The bottom line is that ethics is personal—it’s concerned with what distinct individuals should do in specific situations.
Steve Jobs understood that living a flourishing human life does not come from following impersonal commands. At Apple and NeXT (the company he founded after being effectively fired from Apple in 1985), Jobs created a work environment that was demanding, but flexible. The creativity necessary to develop and perfect Apple products required time to get out of everyday routines. The best ideas were spurred at the water cooler, in casual conversations in the hallway, and during Jobs’s favorite activity—taking long walks outdoors. The headquarters of Apple and Pixar (another company Jobs led during his Apple exile) were specifically designed to facilitate these sorts of spontaneous interactions.
Human flourishing is an endless, very personal process that requires constant work to know yourself. Even at a relatively young age, Jobs was interested in understanding himself, the world, and life’s meaning. His forays led him to India to study Zen Buddhism when he was nineteen. He experimented with psychedelic drugs and took a strong interest in art forms, especially calligraphy. Jobs commonly went on strange diets consisting of limited types of fruits and vegetables since he thought that was better for his body. While some of his experiments in efforts to better understand himself and live more fully seem odd, Jobs carried and built upon what he learned for the rest of his life. The distinctive design of Apple products, and even the name of the company, was influenced by these lessons.
There is no manual to provide by-the-book steps to living the good life. Pursuing human flourishing takes amazing effort and dedication, and a heavy dose of experimentation. While not every foray into a new interest, friendship, or experience will be right for an individual, part of human flourishing is learning from these to inform future choices and better understand yourself.
The Bicycle and Rational Man
An integral aspect of pursuing human flourishing is the use of reason—more specifically, practical wisdom. Practical wisdom involves the synthesis of all the characteristics that make up a person’s nexus and inform their values. It also requires the proper use of reason to order these goods and values in an individualized way. Practical wisdom is not some theoretical game philosophers play. Rather, it’s concerned with real questions as they relate to particular individuals—it is practical in its application.
Interviews with Steve Jobs make it clear he understood that the defining characteristic of humans is the use of reason. Recalling one of his most influential moments, Jobs said:
I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. . . . That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. (In the documentary Memory and Imagination)
This is why Jobs referred to the computer as “the bicycle of the mind.” Humans are tool builders—we use our unique intellect to understand the world around ourselves and then mold the world’s resources to create value. This limitless view of human intellect that Jobs held is what propelled the technology boom and brought about the age of computers.
Central to the success of any entrepreneur is the ability to see future possibilities, and then act to take advantage of them. The natural entrepreneur does not wait for feedback from endless focus groups, or delay realizing his or her vision until a venture capitalist buys into the business plan. What successful entrepreneurs do is see opportunities and then, often in the face of skepticism or outright opposition from others, fully devote themselves to creating what they see as valuable.
Ayn Rand, another thinker whose ideas were influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, argued that reason is central to the very maintenance of human life. She said,
In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival. (“The Objectivist Ethics,” p. 20)
Even though man is a “rational animal” (as Aristotle said), the use of reason is not automatic. It takes work—just as living a flourishing life takes dedication, time, and effort.
Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, put forward his famous “doctrine of the mean,” that virtue lies between two extremes. For example, the virtue of courage lies between the extreme of cowardice and the extreme of recklessness. However, Aristotle did not simply mean that every ethical virtue arises from a moral balancing act between two extremes. Instead, a better way to understand the doctrine of the mean is to see it as the process of weighing various goods in accordance with an individual’s own specific talents, interests, and personality. There are many goods in life—among them friendship, health, beauty, leisure, and intellectual pursuits—and knowing which ones to pursue, and how deeply to pursue them, is the central task of practical wisdom.
For one person, artistic pursuits may compose a larger portion of his or her life. For another, honor may weigh most heavily while artistic pursuits are not absent, but not prominent. Yet another person could value justice the greatest. While all of these values are good for humans, the specific ways they are valued vary depending on individuals’ unique interests, talents, experiences, and communities.
The Never-Ending Process of Perfecting
Immersing yourself in an activity that you see as valuable is one common way you can learn more about yourself and make progress towards personal flourishing.
Jobs took his work at Apple very seriously, but similar to human flourishing, creating a “perfect” product involves substantial investment of time and effort. Reminiscing on the mental and physical toll it took to create the product that resurrected Apple from the dead (the company was ninety days from bankruptcy when Jobs returned), Jobs said that developing the iMac was one of the “neatest” experiences of his life—even though it was also one of the most demanding (Playboy Interview). Trying times like these lead a person to learn what their values are, and this knowledge is central to living a flourishing life.
When talking about how it felt to be forced from the company he built, Jobs said that John Scully, the man who took Jobs’s place at the head of Apple, “destroyed everything I’d spent ten years working for—starting with me” (Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview). Jobs was so enraged that he completely divested himself of all his Apple stock, even though he could have likely earned a much higher return by slowly selling his shares. These quotes and stories of Jobs’s hard-earned success and later disappointment show that just because ethics is personal doesn’t mean that living a flourishing life is easy.
Failure can offer chances to re-evaluate your life, your key values, and your future goals. While Steve Jobs was undoubtedly distraught after being—temporarily—pushed out of Apple’s future, he made the most of his time away from the company (and the money made from selling his Apple stock). He first founded NeXT, another computer company that was focused on the education and research markets. While the computers Jobs guided the company to develop did not sell very well (they were far too expensive), the software they used paved the way for future advances in computing technology. Jobs realized this advantage and scrapped the hardware business to focus solely on software. This turned out to be a wise move as modern Mac and iOS operating systems rely on NeXT’s foundations, and NeXT’s object-oriented programming made it easier for developers to create new programs.
Soon after leaving Apple, Jobs also funded what became Pixar. Creating the computer-animated images that are used in Pixar’s movies takes advanced computing power and applications. This technology took a long time to develop, but less than ten years after Jobs became involved, Pixar released its first movie, Toy Story, to widespread praise. Success after success followed (Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Cars, and others) and animated films were fundamentally changed because of Jobs’s leadership. This movement into the entertainment industry clearly influenced Jobs’s later breakthrough products such as the iPod and iTunes store.
Living a flourishing human life is a dynamic, not static, process and requires constant re-evaluation. In a similar way, successful business requires continuous re-evaluation and re-invention of the company, its processes, purpose, and products. Jobs saw the main problem with business being that when companies grow too large and successful, they begin to believe that their process was what brought about their success. For Steve Jobs, it was, and must continue to be, the innovative products that create lasting value. However, innovation does not arise though some pre-determined formula. The line, “Well that’s the way we’ve always done it around here” was seen by Jobs as the death knell of corporations. To avoid this problem, Jobs insisted that even after Disney bought Pixar, the two continue operating separately, with distinct staff and distinct cultures.
Just as success in business requires much more than reading the latest book on management or entrepreneurship, there’s no one-size-fits all handbook on how to flourish as a person. Even within the course of your life, the process used to “know yourself” changes dramatically, along with the self that is being known. People are not the same in their fifties as they were in their twenties—people who are the same have some serious growing up to do (or they missed out on a lot of fun during their youth).
The Steve Jobs of the 1970s and 1980s differed from the Steve Jobs of the 1990s and 2000s. Being exiled from the company he started changed him in drastic ways. Without losing his trademark tenacity, he developed as a manager and as a communicator of his vision.
In Steve Jobs’s twelve-year absence, Apple grew into one of the lumbering corporate behemoths he warned against. Instead of an open environment that pressed employees to always “Think Different,” Apple was a lost company that had stopped working to improve itself and was content to rest on the laurels (and profits) of past successes.
Thankfully, Jobs returned and brought Apple back to its roots—as an innovative company that built the best products and developed deep relationships with customers. The rest—the iPod, MacBook, iTunes, iPhone, iMac, iPad, Apple Watch—is history.
Was Jobs a Perfectionist?
Was Steve Jobs a moral perfectionist? It turns out this is the wrong question to ask. For one, the answer cannot be fully determined as Jobs was the only person who could truly know. There are no commands from on-high as to what exactly Jobs had to do to flourish, and this makes it difficult for others, especially those who did not know him on a personal level, to judge his moral state.
From the outside, it’s difficult—and usually impossible—to determine whether another human is living a fully-flourishing life. Ethics is not impersonal or based on the views of others. While relationships with others are undoubtedly important, true to its name, individualistic perfectionism centers the focus of ethics on the individual.
Another reason this is the wrong question to ask is that moral perfection is never attained, period. Perfectionist approaches to ethics are continuous in nature. You can never say, “I am finally flourishing! That was a lot of hard work and thankfully now I can stop trying.”
The uplifting news is that while most people will never achieve the commercial success or fame Steve Jobs did, that is far from all that matters in perfectionist ethics. What matters is that each person strives to more fully understand and live his or her life. For most of us, that does not mean we need to revolutionize four major industries (computing, telecommunications, music, and motion picture in Jobs’s case). It generally means having positive relationships with friends and family, following intellectual and artistic pursuits, being in good health, pursuing leisurely hobbies, and finding enjoyment in productive work—“genrally” because the specifics and mix of these generic goods will vary quite a bit from person to person.
Steve Jobs created an unquestionably successful career for himself. His innovativeness is still being felt today—from Apple’s new products to the evolving landscape of technology. He had a vision for the future of computing and, through his efforts, was able to turn his ideas into reality.
Steve Jobs’s life showed that humans have the capability to remake their lives, and sometimes the world, as they desire it to be. In his words:
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much. That’s a very limited life. . . . The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually that if you push in something will pop out the other side and that you can change it, you can mold it, that’s maybe the most important thing. (Steve Jobs: One Last Thing)
It’s in the process of realizing this vision that Steve Jobs offers a unique case study for understanding perfectionist ethics—specifically individualistic perfectionism. He shows us that living a flourishing human life is difficult, requires constant re-evaluation, and, most importantly, is unique to each individual. Moral entrepreneurship is possible and, as with market entrepreneurship, its rewards are limitless.