60 minutes is leading the pack discussing the Steve Jobs. I have only managed to catch part 1 and 2. Will have to return for the remaining three parts. The part I blogged about Jobs stupidity is in part 2. When I was done with that part, I told myself: It was all inevitable. As surely as you throw something up, it must come down. Gravity cannot be willed away. Do people understand that had Jobs chosen early surgery, he would have to pay with his genius? I think the genius was worth giving up.
"Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible," Isaacson wrote.
Likewise he thought he could by his regular act of will expunge the cancer without surgery. Had he given in to surgery easily, the confidence which underpins his magical thinking would crack. The longer he held out, the more he could preserve. He avoided surgery for nine months.
I remember I spent the early evenings of my honeymoon long ago reading "Steve Jobs, The Journey Is the Reward". What I am seeing and reading about Jobs thus far is pretty consistent with that old book.
But my thoughts are not on Steve Jobs. It is what I can use Steve Jobs as a lens to the genius of Lee Kuan Yew. His daughter Lee Wei Ling writing in her latest Sunday column, I feel is wrong about the indispensability of her father. As the former PM grows old, he must recede. Tillson was right that he is better addressed as the former MM. You don't do anymore, you mentor. His understated son was wise to give him that for his last title in Cabinet.
Lee Wei Ling must be struggling with her own mortality. Even if she tries to hide it, she can't. She presented herself as victorious but as a reader, it was hardly convincing. Her writing was more aspirational than achievement.
But we are all eventually defeated by life. Why not death? Because death is a part of life! We can stop breathing, hearts stop beating. What we leave behind might take a longer time to die. Ecclesiastes will ring true very time. Just give it enough time.
Our hardest and greatest act is not try to stop a rebirth that augurs our deaths. I mean death in all its forms. Wisdom is knowing the time has come. More often, we just need to recover from sickness. All times are wrong times except the last one. If you missed that, it will scream at you. You cannot fail to hear. Wise or unwise, you will get it.
From the Bible, why Steve Jobs should have traded his genius for his life. You can say he ran out of luck with his magical thinking; or you can see it as he ran out of grace.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
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