I watched with surprise the 60 Minutes interview this weekend with the Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson on how Jobs’ “faith” in himself and how special he was allowed him to accomplish incredible things, but also likely accelerated his demise. Some key points of the interview which are outlined in detail in his #1 Best-Selling book, “Steve Jobs
- Steve Jobs was abandoned by his father. Upon learning about being adopted, not only was he initially distraught over being abandoned, but he also derived strength from the notion that he was also “chosen”. After all, his adoptive parents did choose him. That reinforced in him the belief that he was in fact special.
- Various stories were recounted where Steve would show up and demand some feat be accomplished by his employees which was deemed impossible. He seemingly arbitrarily picked a timeframe and an accomplishment like, “complete all the coding for X by the end of this month.” When questioned, he would shout them down and say it must be done and it will be done. As impossible as it seemed, people would toil away at all hours trying to make it happen and in the end, it did. This type of success further reinforced his belief that he was able to accomplish unimaginable feats if he wanted it to happen badly enough.
- Fast-forward to his cancer diagnosis…..
Continue Reading When Faith Kills – Life, Death and Your Finances
Jobs was the perfect Prophet poster child of his Baby Boomer generation. He matched almost every criteria that Strauss & Howe attribute to them, both positive and negative, from the uber-competence, to the cult of self-fulfillment, to the idea that beliefs or “values” are more important than facts and real consequences.
Eventually, that type of thinking catches up with the individual and with society as a whole. Reality-blindness leads to destruction.
Overall a very fine article on how we are “surrounded by blind faith”.
But I did not like the bashing of alternative medicine and the curt dismissal of a proper diet.
Cancer (I’ve read) has increased a thousand fold in the past hundred years. Why? Surely, the SHIT we eat must be a chief suspect.
But I’ve read that the vast majority of doctors receive virtually no training in foods and nutrition as either a curative method or, more importantly, as a way to prevent cancer in the first place. That’s a damn tragedy. They would rather push pills and drugs. And that’s tragic also.
And how many hundreds of thousands have died from the side effects of drugs?
Hey … I’m not against drugs, pills, or surgery. I just think they should be a last resort … not the first option!
Stucky: you’r spot on.
The moral decay has led Big Pharma and Corporate Ag to force feed profit over the health and well being of Americans. They finance studies and med school programs spreading a paradigm that profits from poor health. Corp. Ag influences the “Food Pyramid” a lobbyist negotiated fraud made into law. And have you noticed the posters in your doctors office produced by Big Pharma. Anyone still falling for this fraud has their blinders on.
It consumes a lot of research time to now sort out any financial, health, or nutritional decision because of our lapse into such a rotten state. We will get our reset. It is coming.
Dragline, brilliant insight.
Hi Stucky,
I wholeheartedly agree that poor diet is the #1 health issue facing all humans (this is no longer an american problem, it’s global). However, Steve Jobs was vegan since his early years and eschewed a very typical conventional approach and instead pursued herbs and other non-proven methods to treat cancer. CANCER! There are lots of natural blogs out there with conspiracy theories that there’s already a cure of cancer and those evil pharmas are hiding it. Totally silly.
Diet is the ultimate preventative medicine. But once you have cancer, your diet can’t cure it. Not garlic, not herbs. You need an operation, chemo, a cancer vaccine or whatever the treatment is for that particular type.
With regard to why cancer diagnoses have increased? That’s simple. Life expectancy has skyrocketed. Over time, given no other cause of death, of course one would expect cancer diagnoses to increase. Same with heart attacks, Alzhemer’s and all other forms of ailments that become more prevalent over time. Hundreds of years ago, cause of death was disease (now preventable with vaccines and antibiotics), violence (much less prevalent today), childbirth/delivery (much improved) and all other forms of death.
Also, a hundred years ago, you just died. They often didn’t know why. “old age”, or whatever. As technology has improved, not only are lives extended longer, so you eventually die of something besides “died in their sleep”, but now we know what it is.
Very well said, Darwin.
I should have added my disagreement was primarily the doctor’s link in your article … not anything you wrote.
He was slamming your article Darwin.
I agree that the stuff we eat is responsible for a sizeable portion of our physical illness. For example, we now eat highly processed foodstuffs, such as prodigious amounts of white flour, and the antigens (wheat molecules) are presented to our intestines at very high concentrations. No wonder more people are getting food allergy and things such as gluten sensitivity (Celiac disease). When Joe the Farmer milled his wheat the old fashioned way, large clumps of grain never got digested and exposed to the intestinal lining, so the degree of exposure to these things was never that high. With modern industrialized processing, wheat is milled to a very fine powder, and impurities and undigestible fibers are whisked away, leading to improvement in caloric absorption (obesity) and digestive disease (constipation, food allergy, celiac disease, eosinophilic enteritis, etc).
Axel
Have you settled in to your new life? How is it going?
Faith, in anything but yourself, is likely misplaced. (that’s a quote by Muck About)
MA
Axel
Wheat today is not the same wheat your grandparents ate. Currently, a single wheat stalk yields upwards of 10x the number of grains from even 50 years ago. We are eating a genetically modified version of Nature’s wheat.
What kind of monsterous shit are we eating? Better yet, what effect does this frankenwheat have on humans??
But don’t worry. The FDA and Monsanto have conducted many scientific tests. They say it’s OK. Surely, they wouldn’t lie to us, would they??
As for me, I have drastically reduced my wheat consumption since my Moob Reduction Diet. We used to consume about 3 loaves per week. We’re down to less than one loaf per week. We also read labels and buy far far fewer products with wheat as an ingredient. (Same for corn.) Never felt better. As Smokey said, I went from a C-cup down to an A-cup.
Keep up the good work, Stuck…
Don’t fret the GM wheat. We’ve been munching that stuff for many years and while the average life span in the USA is not keeping up with a few other places, it is still climbing..
They dump some agromonster on the market and 30 year olds start keeling over, then you better look out! I’ve started my own survey of obits of breast cancer victims about 5 years ago. The numbers of women aged 45 – 55 that die from matastisized breast cancer has increased by 15-20% compared to only 5 years ago.. Yeah, more people, blah,blah.. There is an increase in the number of fatalities from breast cancer over 5 years ago and no one knows why. I don’t see the figures quotes anywhere in the science journals either. Just in the obits of our local area.
MA