Phoenix Issue No.1 by Tim Webster

Stories 40

J. K. Rowling Interview

In an old-school interview, J.K. Rowling goes in-depth about the creation of her masterpiece book series, Harry Potter. She talks about how it all started, including where and when she first got the idea for wand-brandishing wizard, Harry.

Steve Jobs Interview

In this 1995 interview by Daniel Morrow, we go back in time to parallel the life of Steve Jobs and foreshadow the future of Apple and NeXT. We learn of this genius’ upbringing and how he got to be the man who created one of the most brilliant brands of all time.

Heartbroke Blues

It’s time to talk about what most people are too afraid to even read about: dealing with the most painful experience of human life that is unrequited love. We’ve all been there, loving someone who didn’t love us in the same way, so let’s face our fears and learn how to recover.

The Science of First Impressions

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Columns 4

Passionate Pursuits

Mind Crush Monday

Profit Prophets

This article is about one particular Youtube celebrity, Andrew Hales, who is a 22-year-old college dropout who makes a good living off just being funny and a good samartian for the general public. He uses awkward moments to make some of the funniest videos on Youtube.

This week’s Mind Crush Monday takes Neil Degrasse Tyson for the subject of our admiration of intellect. He is the host for one of the most brilliant shows on television right now, The Cosmos. This article talks about how he is a pioneer for entering his field as an African=American.

In this week’s Profit Prophets, we talk about the statistics behind not only getting referrals for your business, but what to do once you have those referrals so you don’t lose any customers. Attitude is everything.

Phoenix Tales

This week’s Phoenix Tale is about a woman who didn’t just overcome her addiction, but she recycled her addiction to be surrounded by only positive energy.

The Power of Thought

This week’s power of thought comes from a monk who has created a set of habits to always have happiness at a reachable distance. But first he teaches you what happiness really is.

Soul Food

This week’s Soul Food talks about the pineal gland and how it is often represented as the “Third Eye.” But is it something that the government is trying to hide and stifle?

CONT&NTS

Passionate Pursuits Making Money on Youtube

by Kelsey Drapkin

ndrew Hales has a gift. It’s one not many would think of as a positive, but Hales has taken it and run. And now it’s turned him into an Internet star and become his sole source of income. He is awkward. Beginning late March, 2012, Hales decided to make money from his gift through videos. He started a YouTube channel named LAHWF, an acronym for “losing all hope was freedom,” which is a quote from the movie “Fight Club.” A self-proclaimed “naturally awkward guy,” Hales started making his videos for fun. “I just thought it would be funny to do some of that [awkward] stuff and get it on tape,” the 23-yearold told TheBlaze underscored by a lobby pianist while sitting in a hotel in Salt Lake City. “We finally did it and showed my friends, and they all thought it was hilarious, so I started putting them on YouTube.” His first viral video, “Holding People’s Hand,” was his twelfth upload, hitting YouTube on June 11, 2012. It now has over 7.5 million views. So just how did the video go viral? “It’s a mystery,” Hales admitted, laughing in a 4

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pink and purple tank top. “It’s like the weather and stocks. I think Yahoo! posted it on their front page. Then Mashable. Pretty much every big site posted it on their page. I was called into two local news stations to be interviewed.” Hales, who attended Utah Valley University (UVU) for three years before taking a break during which he started making his videos, initially did most of his filming at Brigham Young University and UVU in Provo, Utah, a 40 minute drive from Salt Lake City. As his channel increases in popularity – 836,849 subscribers and counting – Hales has started to travel more to receive authentic reactions from people who are less likely to recognize him. He does admit that the results of shooting outside of Utah may be different due to personality differences in diverse parts of the country and world, but he remains positive. “I don’t think we’ll have a problem filming it anywhere else,” said Hales after explaining how he evaluates peoples’ facial expressions to assess their mood before approaching them

to film. “But, yeah, in Utah there’s definitely more nicer, calmer people in general.” Hales said he gets comments on videos telling him to do his videos in unlikely places, fans saying things like, “You should do that in the ghetto. You’d get shot.” While he admits there tends to be a more positive spirit in Utah, he still holds that people everywhere are generally nice, and the location shouldn’t make a great difference in the reactions he receives. “I think whatever the video and peoples’ reactions, it adds to the spirit of the video,” Hales said. “If everyone’s happy in the video, the viewers are usually happy.” His most recent excursion was to Chengdu, China where he made two videos: “Taking People’s Umbrellas” and “Holding People’s Hand 3.” While he couldn’t speak their language, Hales found that when he pointed to the camera laughing and giving a thumbs up, people understood what was happening. He said 99 percent of the time, he’s sure to ask permission to use footage. About the same percentage of the time, he receives a positive

answer. Hales, who was raised Mormon but no longer practices the faith, now generates enough income from his videos to pay his bills, earning $2-$3 per thousand views on a video through ads. “It’s around there,” Hales said, hesitant to place an exact figure on his income. “But it fluctuates, you know, because sometimes people don’t click on the ads, and you get more money if people click on them. Like the ones when it skips in 5 seconds – if they watch the whole thing, you get paid more for that, and some people have ad-block. “I think what initially started it was the money,” said Hales, who now relies on his YouTube videos as his sole source of income. “I knew you could make money on Youtube, and I had some funny ideas.” Hales, the youngest of five children in his family, now has what he calls the “four hour work week.” “I used to work two part-time jobs, I was 15 grand in debt, and then I started doing the videos, and then I was totally out of debt,” Hales said. “I don’t really have to worry about money anymore because I’m just

a 23-year-old, single male. Yeah, I don’t really work anymore. I just do the videos once a week. Travel a lot now. Yeah, it’s pretty great.” While there are plenty of videos on YouTube that achieve millions of views, Hales doesn’t look at sheer number of hits on his videos when considering if a video has been successful. Instead, he takes a different approach: He looks at the percentage of his subscriber base that watched the video. His goal – and the norm – for views of his videos is between half and three quarters of his followers. “I’ll be kind of disappointed if it’s not even a third or a quarter of the amount of subscribers I have,” said Hales. “If you’re not really parallel with your subscriber base, it means they’ve lost interest, and you’re not keeping them on their toes. So you’ve got to stay interesting.” With so much success, you may wonder if things ever go wrong. They do. Some of his social experiments can go badly for any number of reasons, whether it’s a poor reaction from an unsuspecting participant or a poorly planned experiment. “We did a bit where we stole peoples’ cell phones,” Hales said, describing one of the worst reactions to a video. “I would ask to borrow their cellphone and then just walk away with it, and we just taped the reaction. Then toward the end of the video, I would just start running away. We’d have guys chase me. Then we kind of did a sequel to that and a guy […] chased me and it was in February and he just tackled me into the snow.” Other videos flop because Hales’ idea doesn’t pan out on camera quite as he envisioned. If the first few reactions aren’t great, Hales will scrap an idea & start working on the next. He said he has a phone full of ideas that he documents whenever they come to him. At the heart of his videos is the philosophy Passionate Pursuits

that, you know, you just don’t– you stop caring about what other people want you to do, and, I don’t know, what they think of you, and you just do your own thing.” Hales admits that when running a business, there is a certain level of need to care what customers may think. To meld his philosophy and his business together, he strives to make his videos relatable to his audience. “You just try to make fun of the awkwardness; you try to make it entertaining,” Hales said. “You kind of demonstrate how being awkward is what everyone is, and it’s okay to be awkward sometimes.” So what’s next for Hales? “I’m going to LA next week actually and talking to a bunch of production companies about shows and stuff.” While he’s not sure what may be in the cards for him, one thing is certain: we haven’t seen the last of his awkwardness. Andrew Hales has a gift. It’s one not many would think of as a positive, but Hales has taken it and run. And now it’s turned him into an Internet star and become his sole source of income. He is awkward. Beginning late March, 2012, Hales decided to make money from his gift through videos. He started a YouTube channel named LAHWF, an acronym for “losing all hope was freedom,” which is a quote from the movie “Fight Club.” A self-proclaimed “naturally awkward guy,” Hales started making his videos for fun. “I just thought it would be funny to do some of that [awkward] stuff and get it on tape,” the 23-yearold told TheBlaze underscored by a 6

Phoenix Magazine

lobby pianist while sitting in a hotel in Salt Lake City. “We finally did it and showed my friends, and they all thought it was hilarious, so I started putting them on YouTube.” His first viral video, “Holding People’s Hand,” was his twelfth upload, hitting YouTube on June 11, 2012. It now has over 7.5 million views. So just how did the video go viral? “It’s a mystery,” Hales admitted, laughing in a pink and purple tank top. “It’s like the weather and stocks. I think Yahoo! posted it on their front page. Then Mashable. Pretty much every big site posted it on their page. I was called into two local news stations to be interviewed.” Hales, who attended Utah Valley University (UVU) for three years before taking a break during which he started making his videos, initially did most of his filming at Brigham Young University and UVU in Provo, Utah, a 40 minute drive from Salt Lake City. As his channel increases in popularity – 836,849 subscribers and counting – Hales has started to travel more to receive authentic reactions from peo-

ple who are less likely to recognize him. He does admit that the results of shooting outside of Utah may be different due to personality differences in diverse parts of the country and world, but he remains positive. “I don’t think we’ll have a problem filming it anywhere else,” said Hales after explaining how he evaluates peoples’ facial expressions to assess their mood before approaching them to film. “But, yeah, in Utah there’s definitely more nicer, calmer people in general.” Hales said he gets comments on videos telling him to do his videos in unlikely places, fans saying things like, “You should do that in the ghetto. You’d get shot.” While he admits there tends to be a more positive spirit in Utah, he still holds that people everywhere are generally nice, and the location shouldn’t make a great difference in the reactions he

receives. “I think whatever the video and peoples’ reactions, it adds to the spirit of the video,” Hales said. “If everyone’s happy in the video, the viewers are usually happy.” His most recent excursion was to Chengdu, China where he made two videos: “Taking People’s Umbrellas” and “Holding People’s Hand 3.” While he couldn’t speak their language, Hales found that when he pointed to the camera laughing and giving a thumbs up, people understood what was happening. He said 99 percent of the time, he’s sure to ask permission to use footage. About the same percentage of the time, he receives a positive answer. Hales, who was raised Mormon but no longer practices the faith, now generates enough income from his videos to pay his bills, earning $2-$3 per thousand views on a video through ads. “It’s around there,” Hales said, hesitant to place an exact figure on his income. “But it fluctuates, you know, because sometimes people don’t click on the ads, and you get more money if people click on them. Like the ones when it skips in 5 seconds – if they watch the whole thing, you get paid more for that, and

some people have ad-block. “I think what initially started it was the money,” said Hales, who now relies on his YouTube videos as his sole source of income. “I knew you could make money on Youtube, and I had some funny ideas.” Hales, the youngest of five children in his family, now has what he calls the “four hour work week.” “I used to work two part-time jobs, I was 15 grand in debt, & then I started doing the videos, and then I was totally out of debt,” Hales said. “I don’t really have to worry about money anymore because I’m just a 23-year-old, single male. Yeah, I don’t really work anymore. I just do the videos once a week. Travel a lot now. Yeah, it’s pretty great.” While there are plenty of videos on YouTube that achieve millions of views, Hales doesn’t look at sheer number of hits on his videos when considering if a video has been successful. Instead, he takes a different approach: He looks at the percentage of his subscriber base that watched the video. His goal – and the norm – for views of his videos is between half and three quarters of his followers. “I’ll be kind of disappointed if it’s not even a third or a quarter of the amount of subscribers I have,” said Hales. “If you’re not really parallel with your subscriber base, it means they’ve lost interest, & you’re not keeping them on their toes.

Passionate Pursuits

SOUL FOOD The Pineal Gland & Your Third Eye

by Author Name

he pineal gland (also called the pineal body, epiphysis cerebri, epiphysis or the “third eye”) is a small endocrine gland in the vertebrate brain. It produces the serotonin derivative melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns and seasonal functions. Its shape resembles a tiny pine cone (hence its name), and it is located near the center of the brain, between the two hemispheres, tucked in a groove where the two rounded thalamic bodies join. Every human being’s Pineal Gland or the third eye can be activated to spiritual world frequencies and enables you to have the sense of all knowing, godlike euphoria and oneness all around you. A pineal gland once tuned into to proper frequencies with help of meditation, yoga or various esoteric, occult methods, enables a person to travel into other dimensions, popularly known as astral travel or astral projection or remote viewing. With more advance practice and ancient methods it is also possible to control the thoughts and actions of people in the physical world. Yes, it

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is bizarre, but the United States, former Soviet Union governments and various shadow organization have been doing this type of research for ages and have succeed far beyond our imagination. Pineal Gland is represented in Catholicism in Rome; they depict the pineal as a pine cone in art. The ancient societies like the Egyptians and the Romans knew the benefits and exemplified this in their vast symbologies with a symbol of an eye. Pineal Gland reference is also in back of the U.S. dollar bill with what is called the ‘all seeing eye’, which is a reference to the ability of an individual (or group of individuals) to use this gland and go to the other side (spiritual world) and possibly control the thoughts and actions of people in the physical world by knowing what they are thinking at all times in our physical world. Various research being conducted so far confirms that there are certain periods in the night, between the hours of one and four in the morning where chemicals are released in the brain that bring about feelings of connectedness to one’s

higher source. n the late 90′s, a scientist by the name of Jennifer Luke carries out the first study the effects of sodium fluoride on the pineal gland. She determined that the pineal gland, located in the middle of the brain, was a target for fluoride. The pineal gland simply absorbed more fluoride than any other physical matter in the body, even bones. Pineal gland is like a magnet to sodium fluoride. This calcifies the gland and makes it no longer effective in balancing the entire hormonal processes through the body. Various Researches every since have proved Sodium Fluoride goes to the most important gland in the brain? It’s the only thing that attacks the most important center of our gland in the brain. It’s prevalent in foods, beverages and in our bath and drinking water. Sodium Fluoride is put in 90% of the United States water supply. Water filters you buy in supermarkets do not take the fluoride out. Only reverse osmosis or water distillation. The cheapest way is to buy a water distiller. Sodium Fluoride is in our water supply, food,

pepsi, coke, to dumb down the masses, literally!. The fluoride was introduced into the water by the Nazis and the Russians in their concentration camps to make the camp population docile and do not question authority. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that if you take away the seat of the soul, this disconnects our oneness with our god and power of our source our spirituality and turn us into a mundane slave of secret societies, shadow organizations and the control freak corporate world. Various Researches every since have proved Sodium Fluoride goes to the most important gland in the brain? It’s the only thing that attacks the most important center of our gland in the brain. It’s prevalent in foods, beverages and in our bath and drinking water. Sodium Fluoride is put in 90% of the United States water supply. Water filters you buy in supermarkets do not take the fluoride out. Only reverse osmosis or water distillation. The cheapest way is to buy a water distiller. This calcifies the gland and makes it no longer effective.

Applied psychology graduate programs take a closer look into potential conspiracies and what leads a person to think it or follow it. They also go in depth with the scientific aspects of this, like studying the brain and behaviors of people in certain situations I like to end my article with this quote by Buddha, “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

& Soul Food

“Some experts believe that a person’s attitudes, personality, and work methods are virtually the entire basis for professional success. ”

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PROFIT PROPHETS Things Every Salesperson Must Know

by Jesse Greene

So why is it so difficult for sales managers to recruit and retain highly productive, professional salespeople if sales is such an attractive proposition? Whenever sales managers get together at company meetings, improving sales force effectiveness and high turnover rates amongst the sales force are invariably the topics for discussion. While examining their sales forces and reading articles in Sales and Marketing Management magazine, they seem to ‘accept’ that 80% of all sales are made by only 20% of the sales force. So, what does it take to be a successful salesperson? The high turnover amongst less productive salespeople is accepted as a necessary burden for managing the sales force. This is not so. Research has shown that 55 per cent of people engaged in selling are in the wrong profession. Another 20-25% have the essential attributes to sell, but they should be selling something other than what they are currently selling. This last group have the potential to be highly successful in some cases, but they are only marginal performers in their

present sales positions.* So, what does it take to be a successful salesperson? Some experts believe that a person’s attitudes, personality, and work methods (together classified as their “approach to work”) are virtually the entire basis for professional success. Common sense dictates that a person’s approach to work plays an important role in their performance on the job. A person with a strong sense of responsibility does not place blame on other people when placed in a difficult situation. This is not so. This type of person, referred to as an “agent”, gets things done and when obstacles arise, accepts any errors or omissions that have occurred. Sales managers should strive to hire agent-type representatives. By the very nature of the work itself, successful salespeople possess a unique set of personality attributes that enable them to succeed. Mediocre sales performance cannot be disguised as a salesperson’s success or failure is revealed immediately by the bottom line results. It takes a special kind of individual to succeed in sales. Profit Prophets

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Pass away

14%

Leave due to product dissatisfaction

Move locations

Form other relationships

68%

Leave for competitive reasons

Stop buying a product or service because of an attitude or feeling of indifference towards them by one or more persons representing the company

Why do customers stop giving you business?

Profit Prophets

2. 1.

Always remember to say thank you

The best referrals are from your customers

Saying thank you is the most important part of the referral process. With each referral you want to thank and acknowledge the source of the referral. As your referral source matures and gives you more referrals you want to escalate your appreciation. You can do this in many ways, so start being creative.

When trying to get more referrals, the easiest way is to have happy customers because happy customers equal more referrals. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that simple. 14

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“How do I get more referrals for my business?”

3. Always have great customer service This should be no surprise to any business owner seeking more referrals. Now more than ever great customer service is truly unique. And customers who receive great service can quickly become your best referral source and advocate. A good start to improving customer service is to think about the last great customer service experience you received and how you can adapt this experience into your business. Be your customer’s friend.

4. Create your own referral network There are many organizations which can greatly help you; Business Network International is an obvious one here. Joining this organization will put you leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors in regards to referrals. You can also build your own network of referral partners by finding business with the same customers you are looking for. Meet with these businesses and identify how you can send them referrals. Once you do this and start sending referrals let the business know. Do this a few times and you should start receiving referrals from them as well.

5. Ask your customers for the referral Some customers will automatically become raving fans for you and your business. You don’t have to ask or offer them anything for this to happen as they want you to succeed. This will only occur with a few of your customers and when it does make sure you acknowledge and encourage it. With the other 90% or more of your customers you will have to ask for the referral. To get things started make sure you have a conversation with your customers about referrals and let them know most of your business comes from customers just like them referring you to their friends and family. Education is the key as this 90% group do not think about giving you referrals if you don’t tell them. Profit Prophets

“Isn’t it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn’t that stronger?”

Phoenix Magazine

The Power of Thought The Habits of Happiness

by Matthieu Ricard

o, I guess it is a result of globalization that you can find Coca-Cola tins on top of Everest and a Buddhist monk in Monterey. And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation. So I would like to invite you, also, for a while, to the Himalayas themselves. And to show the place where meditators, like me, who began with being a molecular biologist in Pasteur Institute, and found their way to the mountains. So these are a few images I was lucky to take and be there. There’s the Mount Kailash in Eastern Tibet -- wonderful setting. This is from Marlboro country. (Laughter) This is a turquoise lake. A meditator. This is the hottest day of the year somewhere in Eastern Tibet, on August 1. And the night before, we camped, and my Tibetan friends said, “We are going to sleep outside.” And I said, “Why? We have enough space in the tent.” They said, “Yes, but it’s summertime.” So now, we are going to speak of happiness. As a Frenchman, I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all inter-

esting. I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. And someone wrote an article saying, “Don’t impose on us the dirty work of happiness.” “We don’t care about being happy. We need to live with passion. We like the ups and downs of life. We like our suffering because it’s so good when it ceases for a while.” This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas. It’s about two meters by three, and you are all welcome any time. Now, let’s come to happiness or well-being. And first of all, you know, despite what the French intellectuals say, it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking, “May I suffer the whole day?” Which means that somehow -- consciously or not, directly or indirectly, in the short or the long term, whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream -- somehow, is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. As Pascal said, even the one who hangs himself, somehow, is looking for cessation of suffering -- he finds no other way. But then, if you look in the literature, East The Power of Thought

and West, you can find incredible diversity of definition of happiness. Some people say, I only believed in remembering the past, imagining the future, never the present. Some people say happiness is right now; it’s the quality of the freshness of the present moment. And that led to Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, “All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that they could define -- each of them could define their own terms.” Well, that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life. But now, if it is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our life, then we better know what it is, have some clearer idea. And probably, the fact that we don’t know that is why, so often, although we seek happiness, it seems we turn our back to it. Although we want to avoid suffering, it seems we are running somewhat towards it. And that can also come from some kind of confusions. One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure.

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Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level. Look at the waves coming here to shore. When you are at the bottom of the wave, you hit the bottom. You hit the solid rock. When you are surfing on the top, you are all elated. So you go from elation to depression -- there’s no depth. Now, if you look at the high sea, there might be beautiful, calm ocean, like a mirror. There might be storms, but the depth of the ocean is still there, unchanged. So now, how is that? It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. Even joy -- that can be the spring of happiness. But there’s also wicked joy, you can rejoice in someone’s suffering. So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often, we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, “Everything to be happy -- to have everything to be happy.” That very sentence already reveals the doom of destruction of happiness. To have everything. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong, we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. So now, look at inner conditions. Aren’t they stronger? Isn’t it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn’t that stronger?

ence, and it’s wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom. It’s highly desirable. However, this is not enough. Those are just auxiliary, help conditions. The experience that translates everything is within the mind. So then, when we ask oneself how to nurture the condition for happiness, the inner conditions, and which are those which will undermine happiness. So then, this just needs to have some experience. We have to know from ourselves, there are certain states of mind that are conducive to this flourishing, to this well-being, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, flourishing. There are some which are adverse to this well-being. And so, if we look from our own experience, anger, hatred, jealousy, arrogance, obsessive desire, strong grasping, they don’t leave us in such a good state after we have experienced it. And also, they are detrimental to others’ happiness. So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. At the opposite, everyone knows deep within that an act of selfless generosity, if from the distance, without anyone knowing anything about it, we could save a child’s life, make someone happy. We don’t need the recognition. We don’t need any gratitude. Just the mere fact of doing that fills such a sense of adequation with our deep nature. And we would like to be like that all the time. So is that possible, to change our way of being, to transform one’s mind? Aren’t those negative emotions, or destructive emotions, inherent to the nature of mind? Is change possible in our emotions, in our traits, in our moods? For that we have to ask, what is nature of mind? And if we look from the experiential point of view, there is a primary quality of consciousness that’s just the mere fact to be cognitive, to be aware. Consciousness is like a mirror that allows all images to rise on it. You can have ugly faces, beautiful faces in the mirror. The mirror allows that, but the mirror is not tainted, is not modified, is not altered by those images. Likewise, behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness, pure awareness. This is the

nature. It cannot be tainted intrinsically with hatred or jealousy because, then, if it was always there -- like a dye that would permeate the whole cloth -- then it would be found all the time, somewhere. We know we’re not always angry, always jealous, always generous. So, because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone, there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting. That is the ground for mind training. Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want to harm and want to do good. You cannot, in the same gesture, shake hand and give a blow. So, there are natural antidotes to emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being. So that’s the way to proceed. Rejoicing compared to jealousy. A kind of sense of inner freedom as opposite to intense grasping and obsession. Benevolence, loving kindness against hatred. But, of course, each emotion then would need a particular antidote. Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions, and that’s by looking at the very nature. Usually, when we feel annoyed, hatred or upset with someone, or obsessed with something, the mind goes again and again to that object. Each time it goes to the object, it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance. So then, it’s a self-perpetuating process. So what we need to look now is, instead of looking outward, we look inward. Look at anger itself. It looks very menacing, like a billowing monsoon cloud or thunderstorm. But we think we could sit on the cloud -- but if you go there, it’s just mist. Likewise, if you look at the thought of anger, it will vanish like frost under the morning sun. If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. So this is the principal of mind training. Now, it takes time because we -- it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build

up, so it will take time to unfold them as well. But that’s the only way to go. Mind transformation -- that is the very meaning of meditation. It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality, with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation, which our being and our consciousness is. So, the interface with cognitive science, since we need to come to that, and it was, I suppose, the subject of -- we have to deal in such a short time with brain plasticity. The brain was thought to be more or less fixed. All the nominal connections, in numbers and quantities, were thought -- until the last 20 years -- thought to be more or less fixed when we reached adult age. Now, recently, it has been found that it can change a lot. A violinist, as we heard, who has done 10,000 hours of violin practice, some area that controls the movements of fingers in the brain change a lot, increasing reinforcement of the synaptic connections. So can we do that with human qualities? With loving kindness, with patience, with openness? So that’s what those great meditators have been doing. Some of them who came to the labs, like in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Berkeley, did 20 to 40,000 hours of meditation. They do, like, three years’ retreat, where they do meditate 12 hours a day. And then, the rest of their life, they will do that three or four hours a day. They are real Olympic champions of mind training. This is the place where the meditators -- you can see it’s kind of inspiring. Now, here with 256 electrodes. So what did they find? Of course, same thing. The scientific embargo -- if ever has been to submitted to “Nature,” hopefully, it will be accepted. It deals with the state of compassion, unconditional compassion. We asked meditators, who have been doing that for years and years and years, to put their mind in a state where there’s nothing but loving kindness, total availability to sentient being. Of course, during the training, we do that with objects. We think of people suffering, we think of people we love, but at some point, it can be a state which is all pervading. Here is the preliminary result, which I can show because it’s already been

shown. The bell curve shows 150 controls, and what is being looked at is the difference between the right and the left frontal lobe. In very short, people who have more activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex are more depressed, withdrawn. They don’t describe a lot of positive affect. It’s the opposite on the left side: more tendency to altruism, to happiness, to express, and curiosity and so forth. So there’s a basic line for people. And also, it can be changed. If you see a comic movie, you go off to the left side. If you are happy about something, you’ll go more to the left side. If you have a bout of depression, you’ll go to the right side. Here, the -0.5 is the full standard deviation of a meditator who meditated on compassion. It’s something that is totally out of the bell curve. So, I’ve no time to go into all the different scientific results. They found that -- this is after three and a half hours in an fMRI, it’s like coming out of a space ship. So the whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. It’s more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that’s going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most -- the way our mind functions -- which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience. Now, our compassion is supposed to be put in action. That’s what we try to do in different places. Just this one example is worth a lot of work. This lady with bone TB, left alone in a tent, is going to die with her only daughter. One year later, how she is. Different schools and clinics we’ve been doing in Tibet. And just, I leave you with the beauty of those looks that tells more about happiness than I could ever say. And jumping monks of Tibet. Flying monks. Thank you very much.

& The Power of Thought

STEVE JOBS An interview with the creator of Apple

by Daniel Morrow

teve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955, to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave him up for adoption. Smart but directionless, Jobs experimented with different pursuits before starting Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple’s revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology. He died in 2011, following a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Schieble (later Joanne Simpson) and Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, two University of Wisconsin graduate students who gave their unnamed son up for adoption. His father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian political science professor and his mother, Joanne Schieble, worked as a speech therapist. Shortly after Steve was placed for adoption, his biological parents married and had another child, Mona Simpson. It was not until Jobs was 27 that he was able to uncover information on his

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biological parents. As an infant, Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs and named Steven Paul Jobs. Clara worked as an accountant and Paul was a Coast Guard veteran and machinist. The family lived in Mountain View within California’s Silicon Valley. As a boy, Jobs and his father would work on electronics in the family garage. Paul would show his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby which instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs. While Jobs has always been an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. A prankster in elementary school, Jobs’s fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school—a proposal that his parents declined. After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. This interview was conducted in 1995 by Daniel Morrow shortly after Steve Jobs left Apple and started another business venture, NeXt.

teve, I’d like to begin with some biographical information. Tell us about yourself. I was born in San Francisco, California, USA, planet Earth, February 24, 1955. I can go into a lot of details about my youth, but I don’t know that anybody would really care about that too much. Well they might in three hundred years because all this print is going to disintegrate. Tell me a little bit about your parents, your family; what are the earliest things you remember? In 1955, Eisenhower was still President. I don’t remember him but I do remember growing up in the late 50’s and early 60’s. It was a very interesting time in the United States. America was sort of at its pinnacle of post World War II prosperity and everything had been fairly straight and narrow from haircuts to culture in every way, and it was just starting to broaden into the 60’s where things were going to start expanding out in new directions. Everything was still very successful. Very young. America seemed young and naive in many ways to me, from my memories at that time. So you would have been about five or six years old when John Kennedy was assassinated? I remember John Kennedy being assassinated. I remember the exact moment that I heard he had been shot. Where were you at the time? I was walking across the grass at my schoolyard going home at about three in the afternoon when somebody yelled that the President had been shot and killed. I must have been about seven or eight years old, I guess, and I knew exactly what it meant. I also remember very much the Cuban Missile Crisis. I probably didn’t sleep for three or four nights because I was afraid that if I went to sleep I wouldn’t wake up. I guess I was seven years old at the time and I understood exactly what was going on. I think everybody did. It was really a terror that I will never forget, and it probably never really left. I think that everyone felt it at that time. Those of us who were older, such as

myself, remember making plans of where we would meet if the country was devastated. It was a strange time. One of the things we’re trying to get a handle on is passion and power. What were the early things you were passionate about, that you were interested in? I was very lucky. My father, Paul, was a pretty remarkable man. He never graduated from high school. He joined the Coast Guard in World War II and ferried troops around the world for General Patton; and I think he was always getting into trouble and getting busted down to Private. He was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands. He had a workbench out in his garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said “Steve, this is your workbench now.” And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me . . . teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together. One of the things that he touched upon was electronics. He did not have a deep understanding of electronics himself but he’d encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics and I got very interested in that. I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley for the most part at that time was still orchards -- apricot orchards and prune orchards -- and it was really paradise. I remember the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other. This was when you were six, seven, eight years old at the time. Right. Exactly. It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up. There was a man who moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block, who was new in the neighborhood with his wife, and it turned out that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard

and a ham radio operator and really into electronics. What he did to get to know the kids in the block was rather a strange thing: He put out a carbon microphone and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice would be amplified by the speaker. Kind of strange thing when you move into a neighborhood but that’s what he did. This is great. I of course started messing around with this. I was always taught that you needed an amplifier to amplify the voice in a microphone for it to come out in a speaker. My father taught me that. I proudly went home to my father and announced that he was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with just a battery. My father told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and

we got into a very large argument. So I dragged him down and showed him this and he himself was a little befuddled. I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. Steve Jobs Interview

He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that “I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits so I could build that.” Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment, that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way. It sounds like you were really lucky to have your dad as sort of a mentor. I was going to ask you about school. What was the formal side of your education like? Good? Bad? School was pretty hard for me at the beginning. My mother taught me how to read before I got to school and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted to read books because I loved reading books and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five year olds like to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me. By the time I was in third grade, I had a good buddy of mine, Rick Farentino, and the only way we had fun 22

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was to create mischief. I remember we traded everybody. There was a big bike rack where everybody put their bikes, maybe a hundred bikes in this rack, and we traded everybody our lock combinations for theirs on an individual basis and then went out one day and put everybody’s lock on everybody else’s bike and it took them until about ten o’clock that night to get all the bikes sorted out. We set off explosives in teacher’s desks. We got kicked out of school a lot. In fourth grade I encountered one of the other saints of my life. They were going to put Rick Farentino and I into the same fourth grade class, and the principal said at the last minute “No, bad idea. Separate them.” So this teacher, Mrs. Hill, said “I’ll take one of them.” She taught the advanced fourth grade class and thank God I was the random one that got put in the class. She watched me for about two weeks and then approached me. She said, Steven, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I have this math workbook and if you take it home and finish on your own without any help and you bring it back to me, if you get it 80% right, I will give you five dollars and one of these really big suckers she bought and she held it out in front of me. One of these giant things. And I looked at her like “Are you crazy lady”? Nobody’s ever done this before and of course I did it. She basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn. She got me kits for making cameras. I ground my own lens and made a camera. It was really quite wonderful. I think I probably learned more academically in that one year than I learned in my life. It created problems, though, because when I got out of fourth grade they tested me and they decided to put me in high school and my parents said “No.”. Thank God. They said “He can skip one grade but that’s all.” But not to high school. And I found skipping one grade to be very troublesome in many ways. That was plenty enough. It did create some problems. This seems like such a good place

to talk about your experience in the fourth grade. Do you think that had a major impact on your own interest in education? I mean if there is anyone in the computer industry that is associated with computers and education it has got to be you and Apple. I’m sure it did. I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don’t believe in equal outcome because unfortunately life’s not like that. It would be a pretty boring place if it was. But I really believe in equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to me more than anything means a great education. Maybe even more important than a great family life, but I don’t know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that. But it pains me because we do know how to provide a great education. We really do. We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short of that. I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail. I’m 100% sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I would have absolutely have ended up in jail. I could see those tendencies in myself to have a certain energy to do something. It could have been directed at doing something interesting that other people thought was a good idea or doing something interesting that maybe other people didn’t like so much. When you’re young, a little bit of course correction goes a long way. I think it takes pretty talented people to do that. I don’t know that enough of them get attracted to go into public education. You can’t even support a family on what you get paid. I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administra-

tors run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible. Some people say that this new technology may be a way to bypass that. Are you optimistic about that? I absolutely don’t believe that. As you’ve pointed out, I’ve helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world and I absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can. The elements of discovery are all around you. You don’t need a computer. Here - why does that fall? You know why? Nobody in the entire world knows why that falls. We can describe it pretty accurately but no one knows why. I don’t need a computer to get a kid interested in that, to spend a week playing with gravity and trying to understand that and come up with reasons why. But you do need a person. You need a person. Especially with computers the way they are now. Computers are very reactive but they’re not proactive; they are not agents, if you will. They are very reactive. What children need is something more proactive. They need a guide. They don’t need an assistant. I think we have all the material in the world to solve this problem; it’s just being deployed in other places. I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn’t what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal. . . . The market competition model seems to indicate that where there is a need there is a lot of providers willing to tailor their products to fit that need and a lot of competition which forces them to get better and better. I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world’s problems, but unfortunately it just ain’t so. I’ll give you an analogy. Alot of times we think “Why is the television programming so bad? Why are television shows so demeaning, so poor?” The first thought that occurs to you is “Well, there is a conspiracy:

the networks are feeding us this slop because its cheap to produce. It’s the networks that are controlling this and they are feeding us this stuff.” But the truth of the matter, if you study it in any depth, is that networks absolutely want to give people what they want so that will watch the shows. If people wanted something different, they would get it. And the truth of the matter is that the shows that are on television, are on television because that’s what people want. The majority of people in this country want to turn on a television and turn off their brain and that’s what they get. And that’s far more depressing than a conspiracy. Conspiracies are much more fun than the truth of the matter, which is that the vast majority of the public are pretty mindless most of the time. I think the school situation has a parallel here when it comes to technology. It is so much more hopeful to think that technology can solve the problems that are more human and more organizational and more political in nature, and it ain’t so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46 year old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn’t be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer. I’m really glad we had a chance to talk about it. To talk about other things, so much has been written about you rather than go over a lot of those stories I was going to ask which one you think is the best and the fairest and if there are aspects of your career that you think have been left out. I have to tell you truly that I’m pretty ignorant about it because I haven’t read any of them. I skimmed one one time and read the first ten pages and they got my birthday wrong by a year. If they can’t even get this right then this is probably not worth reading. I don’t even remember the name of the one I skimmed. I always considered part of my job was to keep the quality level of people in the organizations I work with very high. That’s what I consider one of the few things

I actually can contribute individually -- to to really try to instill in the organization the goal of only having ‘A’ players. Because in this field, like in a lot of fields, the difference between the worst taxi cab driver and the best taxi cab driver to get you crosstown Manhattan might be two to one. The best one will get you there in fifteen minutes, the worst one will get you there in a half an hour. Or the best cook and the worst cook, maybe it’s three to one. Pick something like that. In the field that I’m in the difference between the best person and the worst person is about a hundred to one or more. The difference between a good software person and a great software person is fifty to one, twenty-five to fifty to one, huge dynamic range. Therefore, I have found, not just in software, but in everything I’ve done it really pays to go after the best people in the world. It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found that my job has sometimes exactly been that: to get rid of some people who didn’t measure up. And I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun. Is that the hardest and the most painful part of managing a company from your point of view? Oh sure. Of course. At times I’ve been pretty hard about it and a lot of times people haven’t wanted to leave and I haven’t given them any choices. If somebody wanted to write a book about me, most of my friends would never talk to them but they could go find the handful of a few dozen people that I fired in my life who hate my guts. It was certainly the case in the one book I skimmed. I mean it was just “let’s throw the darts at Steve.” Such is life. That’s the world I’ve chosen to live in. If I didn’t like that part of it enough, I’d escape and I haven’t, so I’m willing to put up with that. But I certainly didn’t find it very accurate. I’ve got a couple of questions I’d like to ask you about specifically about your experience at Apple. Looking back at the years you were there, what were the accomplishments you are most proud of? Are there a couple Steve Jobs Interview

of Apple stories you really like to tell? Apple was this incredible journey. I mean we did some amazing things there. The thing that bound us together at Apple was the ability to make things that were going to change the world. That was very important. We were all pretty young. The average age in the company was mid to late twenties. Hardly anybody had families at the beginning and we all worked like maniacs, and the greatest joy was that we felt we were fashioning collective works of art much like twentieth century physics. Something important that would last, that people contributed to and then could give to more people; the amplification factor was very large. In doing the Macintosh, for example, there was a core group of less than a hundred people, and yet Apple shipped over ten million of them. Of course everybody’s copied it and it’s hundreds of millions now. That’s pretty large amplification, a million to one. It’s not often in your life that you get that opportunity to amplify your values a hundred to one, let alone a million to one. That’s really what we were doing. If you look at what we tried to do, it was to say “Computation and how it relates to people is really in its infancy here. We are in the right place at the right time to change the course of that vector a little bit.” What’s interesting is that if you change the course of a vector near its origin, by time it gets a few miles out its course is radically different. We were very cognizant of this fact. From almost the beginning at Apple we were, for some incredibly lucky reason, fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time. The contributions we tried to make embodied values not only of technical excellence and innovation -- which I think we did our share of -- but innovation of a more humanistic kind. The things I’m most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic came together, as it did in publishing for example. The Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing. The typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically -- those two things came together and empowered people to use the computer without having to understand arcane 24

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computer commands. It was the combination of those two things that I’m the most proud of. It happened on the Apple II and it happened on the Lisa, although there were other problems with the Lisa that caused it to be a market failure; and then it happened again big time on the Macintosh. You used an interesting word in describing what you were doing. You were talking about art not engineering, not science. Tell me about that. I think there’s actually very little distinction between an artist and a scientist or engineer of the highest calibre. I’ve never had a distinction in my mind between those two types of people. They’ve just been to me people who pursue different paths but basically kind of headed to the same goal which is to express something of what they perceive to be the truth around them so that others can benefit by it. And the artistry is in the elegance of the solution, like chess playing or mathematics? No. I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. I think that a lot of the folks on the Macintosh team were capable of doing that and did exactly that. If you study these people a little bit more what you’ll find is that in this particular time, in the 70’s and the 80’s the best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. Almost all of them were musicians. A lot of them were poets on the side. They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents. The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter. Many of the people were introspective, inward people who expressed how they felt about other people or the rest of humanity in general into their work, work that other people would use. People put a lot of love into these products, and a

lot of expression of their appreciation came to these things. It’s hard to explain. It’s passion in the truest sense of the word. The computer industry is at a very critical juncture where those people are clearly leaving the field. Apple had a reputation as a company that absolutely broke the mold and set its own course. Looking back from where you are today with NeXT, do you think that, as Apple grew larger, it could have sustained that original approach? Or was it destined to become a big standard American company? That’s a funny question. Apple did grow big and sustain that approach. When I left Apple it was a two billion dollar company. We were Fortune 300 and something. We were 350. When the Mac was introduced we were a billion-dollar corporation; so Apple grew from nothing to two billion dollars while I was there. That’s a pretty high growth rate. It grew five times since I left basically on the back of the Macintosh. I think what’s happened since I left in terms of growth rate has been trivial compared with what it was like when I was there. What ruined Apple wasn’t growth. What ruined Apple was values. John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place -- which was making great computers for people to use. They didn’t care about that anymore. They didn’t have a clue about how to do it and they didn’t take any time to find out because that’s not what they cared about. They cared about making a lot of money. So they had this wonderful thing that a lot of brilliant people made called the Macintosh and they got very greedy. And instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision -- which was to make this thing an appliance, to

get this out there to as many people as possible -- they went for profits and they made outlandish profits for about four years. Apple was one of the most profitable companies in America for about four years. What that cost them was the future. What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share, which was what we always tried to do. Macintosh would have had a 33% market share right now, maybe even higher, maybe it would have even been Microsoft, but we’ll never know. Now it’s got a single-digit market share and falling. There’s no way to ever get that moment in time back. The Macintosh will die in another few years and it’s really sad. The problem is this: No one at Apple has a clue as to how to create the next Macintosh because no one running any part of Apple was there when the Macintosh was made -- or any other product at Apple. They’ve just been living off that one thing now for over a decade and the last attempt was the Newton and you know what happened to that. It’s kind of tragic, but as unemotionally as I can be, that’s what’s happening. Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat, companies tend to have long glide slopes because of the installed bases. But Apple is just gliding down this slope and they’re losing market share every year. Things start to spiral down once you get under a certain threshold. And when developers no longer write applications for your computer, that’s when it really starts to fall apart.

There’s obviously a lot of emotional attachment to Apple. Oh sure. Apple could have lived forever and kept shipping great products forever. Apple was for awhile like Sony. It was the place that made the coolest stuff. Is there a user of Apple or a story that you could tell that in your mind exemplifies what the company stood for and its values at its best? What customers were using the Apple when you were there? There were two kinds of customers. There were the educational aspects of Apple and then there were sort of the non-educational. On the non-educational side, Apple was two things. One, it was the first “lifestyle” computer and, secondly, it’s hard to remember how bad it was in the early 1980’s. With IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there; it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they had done a pretty bad job. You needed to know a lot. Things were kind of slipping backwards. You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the goliath, IBM, and saying “Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It’s called Macintosh

and it is so much better. It’s going to beat you and you’re going to do it.” And that’s what Apple stood for. That was one of the things. The other thing was a little bit further back in time. One of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was. When I grew up I was lucky because I was in Silicon Valley. When I was ten or eleven I saw my first computer. It was down at NASA Ames [Research Center]. I didn’t see the computer, I saw a terminal and it was theoretically a computer on the other end of the wire. I fell in love with it. I saw my first desktop computer at Hewlett-Packard which was called the 9100A. It was the first desktop in the world. It ran BASIC and APL, I think. I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life. We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer, so we thought: The kids can’t wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America. It turns out that there are about a hundred thousand schools in America, about ten thousand high schools, about ninety thousand K through 8. We couldn’t afford that as a company. But we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books, a national law that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction. That basically means you don’t make any money, you lose some but you don’t lose too much. You lose about ten percent. We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America and it would cost our company ten Steve Jobs Interview

million dollars which was a lot of money to us at that time but it was less than a hundred million dollars if we didn’t have that. We decided that we were willing to do that. It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever done. We found our local representative, Pete Stark over in East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down an we wrote a bill. We literally drafted a bill to make these changes. We said “If this law changes we will donate a hundred thousand computers at a cost of ten million dollars to us.” We called it “the kids can’t wait bill.” Pete Stark introduced it in the House and Senator Danforth introduced it in the Senate and I refused to hire any lobbyists and I went back to Washington myself and I actually walked the halls of Congress for about two weeks, which was the most incredible thing. I met probably two-thirds of the House and over half of the Senate myself and sat down and talked with them. It was very interesting. I found that the House Members are routinely less intelligent than the Senate and they were much more kneejerk to their constituencies -- which I found initially quite offensive but came to understand later to be a really good idea. Maybe that’s what the framers wanted. They weren’t supposed to think too much, they were supposed to represent. The Senators are supposed to think a little more. The Bill passed the House with the largest favorable majority of any tax bill in the history of this country. What happened was it was in during Carter’s lame duck session and Bob Dole who was then Speaker of the House killed it. He would not bring it to the floor and we ran out of time. We would have had to have started the process over in the next year and I gave up. However, fortunately something unique happened. California thought this was such a good idea they came to us and said “You don’t have to do a thing. We’re going to pass a bill that says ‘Since you operate in the State of California and pay California Tax, we’re going to pass this bill that says that if the federal bill doesn’t pass, then you get the tax break in California’. You can do it in California, which is ten thousand schools”. So we did. We gave away ten thousand computers in the State of California. 26

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We got a whole bunch of the software companies to give away software. We trained teachers for free and monitored this thing over the next few years. It was phenomenal. One of my great experiences and one of my biggest regrets was that really tried to do this on a national level and got so close. I don’t think Bob Dole even knew what he was doing but he really unfortunately screwed up here. That’s a great story. That’s part of what Apple was about. On the business side, I was at the Washington Post when the Macintosh was introduced. The Post was an IBM Big Blue Shop and nobody was going to play with it and then the Macintosh infiltrated. There was almost a guerilla movement. It started with ad artists and now the whole front end of the newspaper is being done on Apple machines. Was that fairly common, this guerilla movement? Actually we had no concept of how to sell to corporate America because none of us had come from there. It was like another planet to us. Unfortunately I had to learn all that stuff. If I only knew [then] what I know now we could have done a lot better. Our attempts to sell to corporate America were just bungled & we ended up just selling to people who just [were] sort of buying a product for its merit not because of the company it came from. I mean everybody was very hooked on Big Blue back then and they bought IBM. There was that famous phrase “You never get fired for buying IBM.” We fortunately were able to change a lot of that. & Apple, as you know, I believe, is a bigger supplier of personal computers than IBM. Tell me about what motivated you to establish NeXT and what were the goals you set out to accomplish when you set-up this new company? That’s complicated. We basically wanted to keep doing what we were doing at Apple, to keep innovating. But we made a mistake, which was to try to follow the same formula we did at Apple, to make the whole widget. But the market was changing. The industry was changing. The scale was changing. And in the end we knew we would be either the last company to

make it or the first to not make it. We were right on the edge. We thought we would be the last one that made it, but we were wrong. We were the first one that didn’t. We put an end to the companies that tried to do that. We certainly made our fair share of mistakes, but in the end I think we should have taken a bit longer to realize the world was changing and just gone on to be a software company right off the bat. Right off the bat? The machine got great reviews when it came out. The machine was the best machine in the world. Believe it or not, they’re selling on the used market, in some cases, for more than we sold them for originally. They’re hard to find even today. We haven’t even made them for two, two and a half years. What are the features that are on the NeXT machine that are still missing from machines today? Well first of all it, was a totally ‘plugand-play’ machine. Except for Macintosh, that’s hard to find. It’s a powerful machine, way beyond the Macintosh. So it sort of nicely combined the power of the workstations with the ‘plug & playness’ of the Mac. Second of all, the machine had a fit and finish that you don’t find today. It’s beautiful. I don’t just mean in packaging; I mean in terms of operation. Simple things to complex things. Simple things like soft power on and off. A trivial little thing but as you know one, of the biggest reasons people lose information on computers is they turn them off at the wrong time. And when you get into a multi-tasking network system, that could have much more severe consequences. So we were the first people to do that and some of the only people who do that, where you push a button and you request the computer to turn off. It figures out what it needs to do to shut down gracefully and then turns itself off. Of course the NeXT Computer was also the first computer with built-in high quality sound, CD quality sound. Most people do that now. It took them a long time but most people do that. It was just ahead of its time.

NeXT Software: What makes it different? What trends does it respond to? That’s the real gem. I’ll tell you an interesting story. When I was at Apple, a few of my acquaintances said “You really need to go over to Xerox PARC (which was Palo Alto Research Center) and see what they’ve got going over there.” They didn’t usually let too many people in but I was able to get in there and see what they were doing. I saw their early computer called the Alto, which was a phenomenal computer, and they actually showed me three things there that they had working in 1976. I saw them in 1979. Things that took really until a few years ago for us to fully re-create, for the industry to fully re-create in this case with NeXTStep. However, I didn’t see all three of those things. I only saw the first one, which was so incredible to me that it saturated me. It blinded me to see the other two. It took me years to re-create them and rediscover them and incorporate them back into the model, but they were very far ahead in their thinking. They didn’t have it totally right, but they had the germ of the idea of all three things. And the three things were graphical user interfaces, object oriented computing and networking. Let me go through those. Graphical interface: The Alto had the world’s first graphical user interface. It had windows. It had a crude menu system. It had crude panels and stuff. It didn’t work right but it basically was all there. Objects: They had Smalltalk running, which was really the first object-oriented language. Simula was really the first, but Smalltalk was the first official object-oriented language. Third, networking: They invented Ethernet there, as you know. And they had about two hundred Altos with servers hooked up in a local area network there doing email and everything else over the network, all in 1979. I was so blown away with the potential of the germ of that graphical user interface that I saw that I didn’t even assimilate or even stick around to investigate fully the other two. NeXTStep turned some of that vision into reality. It incorporated the world’s first truly commercial object-oriented system, and really was the most networked system in the

world when it came out. I think the world has made a lot of progress in networking but hasn’t yet crossed the hurdle into objects and what’s happened with NeXTStep. It’s starting to get adopted by some very large corporate customers. It is now the most popular object-oriented system in the world, as objects are on the threshold of starting to move into the mainstream. The company last year recorded its first profit in its nine-year history, and sold $50 million worth of software. I think we’re going to have some significant growth this year and it’s fairly clear that NeXT can get up to being a few-hundred-million-dollar software company in the next three or four years and be the largest company offering objects -- until Microsoft comes into the market at some point, probably with a pretty half-baked product. Some people say that in the future object-oriented software is going to be the only kind of software. Of course it’s true. I remember being at Xerox at 1979. It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way some day; it was so obvious once you saw it. It didn’t require tremendous intellect. It was so clear. The minute you understand objects, it’s all exactly the same. All software will be written using object-oriented technology some day. You can argue about how long its going to take, who the winners and losers are going to be, but I don’t think a rational person will debate its significance. Give me your thoughts on the current status and the future of the Internet and the commercial online services and how they’re affecting computer development. The Internet and the World Wide Web are clearly the most exciting thing going on in computing today. They’re exciting for three or four reasons. Number one, ultimately computers are turning into communications devices and ultimately we’re spending more and more of the cycles of the computer to not only make it easy to use but to make it easy to communicate. The Web is the miss-

ing piece of the puzzle which is really going to power that vision much farther forward. It’s very exciting in that way. Secondly, it’s very exciting because it is going to destroy vast layers of our economy and make available a presence in the marketplace for very small companies, one that is equal to very large companies. Let me give you an example. A small three-person company in Phoenix, Arizona can have a Web server that looks identical if not better than IBM’s or the Gap’s or anybody else, any large company. They can gain access to this electronic distribution channel for free. They don’t have to build buildings. They don’t have to sign up a thousand distributors and have people to call on them, etc., etc. In essence, direct distribution from the manufacturer to the customer via the Internet, via the Web, direct contact, direct transactions and distribution via UPS or Federal Express -- that’s going to be cheaper than going through all these middlemen or building hundreds of stores around the country. It is going radically change the way goods and services are discovered, sold and delivered, not only in this country but eventually all over the world. As you know, electrons travel at the speed of light and so it tends to bring the world much closer together in terms of providers and customers. That’s pretty exciting. The levelling of big and small. The levelling of near and distant. The third reason it’s very exciting is that Microsoft doesn’t own it and I don’t think they can. It’s the one thing in the industry that Microsoft can probably never own. I think one of the things that’s essential is that the government continue to fund the Internet as a public trust, as a public facility and remove any of these ridiculous notions of privatizing it that have been brought up. I don’t think they’re going to fly, thankfully. The Internet cost the U.S. Federal Government about fifty to seventy-five million a year. This is peanuts for what its doing right now and even if that cost someday escalated to half a billion a year, which of course you could build the whole Internet each year from scratch if you had to, you could replace all the equipment, etc. That would be an extrodinarily small price to pay for keeping it from getSteve Jobs Interview

ting into the hands of any one company and thereby starting to destroy and control the innovation that could take place around the Internet. It’s the one last bright spot of hope in the computer industry for some serious innovation to happen at a rapid pace. What’s also great about it, again, is that the U.S. in the forefront here. That’s what’s great about the whole personal computer software industry. This is another example where the U.S. is in the forefront. It should be kept open. It should be kept free. The World Wide Web is literally becoming a global phenomenon. Are you optimistic about it staying free? Yes, I am optimistic about it staying free but before you say it’s global too fast, it’s estimated that over one-third of the total Internet traffic in the world originates or destines in California. So I actually think this is a pretty typical case where California is again on the leading edge not only in a technical but cultural shift. So I do expect the Web to be a worldwide phenomenon, distributed fairly broadly. But right now I think it’s a U.S. phenomenon that’s moving to be global, and one which is very concentrated in certain pockets, such as California. 85% of the world doesn’t have access to a telephone yet. The potential is there and you’re pretty optimistic. Tell me about Pixar. This story is very interesting. I got hooked up with some folks. Again a friend of mine told me I should go visit these crazy guys up in San Rafael, California who were working at Lucasfilm. Now George Lucas, who produced the Star Wars film trilogy, was a smart guy, and at one point when he had a lot of money coming in from these films he realized that he ought to start a technology group. He had a few problems he wanted to solve. I’ll give you an example of one. When you make a copy of analog audio recording, like tape cassette to another tape cassette, you pick up noise artifacts, in this case hiss. If you make a second-generation copy it gets worse exponentially. The same is true of optical analog copies. You take a piece of film, make an optical copy, you pick up noise artifacts, in 28

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this case optical noise which comes across as blurriness in some cases, comes across as other noise artifacts in other cases. Now George, to make Star Wars, actually had to composite together up to thirteen pieces of film for each frame. The matt paintings for the backgrounds might be a few pieces of film, the models might be a few pieces of film, the live action might be a few pieces of film, some special effects might be a few pieces of film. And every time he’d make a copy to composite two together and then add a third, then add a fourth, he was adding noise artifacts with each generation. If you go buy a laser disk of any of the Star Wars Films, if you stop it on some of the frames, they are really grungy. Incredibly noisy, very bad quality. George being the perfectionist he was, said “I’d like to do it perfectly,” do it digitally; and nobody had ever done that before. He hired some very smart people and they figured out how to do it for him, digitally with no noise artifacts. They developed software and actually built some specialized hardware at the time. George had at some point decided that this is costing him several million dollars a year and decided that he didn’t want to fund it anymore, so I bought this group from George Lucas and I incorporated it as Pixar and we set about revolutionizing high-end computer graphics. If you look at the ten most important revolutions in high-end graphics, in the last ten years, eight of them have come out of Pixar. All of the software that was used to make Terminator, for example -- to actually construct the images that you saw on the screen -- or Jurassic Park with all the dinosaurs, was Pixar Software. Industrial Light and Magic uses it as the base for all of their stuff. But Pixar had another vision. Pixar’s vision was to tell stories. To make real films. Our vision was to make the world’s first animated feature film -- completely computer synthetic, sets, characters, everything. After ten years, we have done exactly that. We have developed tools, all proprietary, to do this, to manage the production of this thing as well as the drawing of this thing, computer synthetic drawing. We are finishing up making the world’s first computer animated feature film. Pixar has written it, directed it, produc-

ing it. The Walt Disney Corporation is distributing it and it’s coming out this year as Walt Disney’s Christmas Picture. It’s coming out November 11, I believe, and it’s called “Toy Story.” You will hear a lot about it because I think its going to be the most successful film of this year. Fantastic. It’s phenomenal. Tom Hanks is the main character’s voice. Tim Allen is the second main character. Randy Newman’s doing the music for it. It’s just phenomenal. There’s a lot of hoopla about Hollywood and Silicon Valley converging. They call it “Sillywood” I think. Pixar is really going to be the first digital studio in the whole world. It really combines art and technology together. Again in a very wonderful way. Pixar’s got by far and away the best computer graphics talent in the entire world and it now has the best animation and artistic talent in the whole world to do these kinds of film. We have the second largest group of animators in the world outside of Disney and we think the most talented in the world working side by side with these computer scientists, the best graphics people in the world. There’s really no one else in the world who could do this stuff. It’s really phenomenal. We’re probably close to ten years ahead of anybody else. It sounds really exciting. The question I was going to ask -- and you’ve partially answered it -- was about start-up companies. As I look around the facility here and your literature, there are alliances written all over the walls literally. You’re aligned with Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Oracle and Digital and all the systems integrators. Communications companies and information technology companies are merging. And becoming one. Do you think it will ever be possible for a new major start-up company to develop if they’re going to focus on major applications or software? Will there ever be another? I think yes. One might sometimes say in despair no, but I think yes. And the reason is because human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true. I’ve always felt that death is the

greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young. It didn’t know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn’t know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We’re not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We’re dissatisfied because the current state didn’t live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress. One of the things that happens in organizations as well as with people is that they settle into ways of looking at the world and become satisfied with things and the world changes and keeps evolving and new potential arises but these people who are settled in don’t see it. That’s what gives start-up companies their greatest advantage. The sedentary point of view is that of most large companies. In addition to that, large companies do not usually have efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company which are the people making the big decisions. There may be people at lower levels of the company that see these changes coming but by the time the word ripples up to the highest levels where they can do something about it, it sometimes takes ten years. Even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels, usually the upper levels screw it up somehow. I mean IBM and the personal computer business is a good example of that. I think as long as humans don’t solve this human nature trait of sort of settling into a world view after a while, there will always be opportunity for young companies, young people to innovate. As it should be. And that was going to be my closing question before I gave you chance to sort of free associate on your own. That is to talk to young people who sort of look to you as a role model. Opportunities for innovation you think they’re still possible. What are the factors of success for young people today? What should they avoid?

I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say “I want to be an entrepreneur.” And I go “Oh that’s great, what’s your idea?”And they say “I don’t have one yet.” And I say “I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work.” I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there. Your talking made me think of the other side of that. You talk about the passion side. What would you say, there’s passion and then there’s power. What you would say about the responsibilities of power, once you’ve achieved a certain level of success? Power? What is that? You need passion to build a company like Apple or IBM or any other major company. Once you’ve taken the passion to that level and built a company and are in the position like a Bill Gates at Microsoft or anybody else, yourself, what are the responsibilities of those who have succeeded and have economic power, social power? I mean, you’ve changed the world. What are your responsibilities within that? That question can be taken on many levels. Obviously if you’re running a company you have responsibilities but as an individual I don’t think you have responsibilities. I think the work speaks for itself. I don’t think that people have special responsibil-

ities just because they’ve done something that other people like or don’t like. I think the work speaks for itself. I think people could choose to do things if they want to but we’re all going to be dead soon, that’s my point of view. Somebody once told me, they said “Live each day as if it would be your last and one day you’ll certainly be right.” I do that. You never know when you’re going to go but you are going to go pretty soon. If you’re going to leave anything behind it’s going to be your kids, a few friends and your work. So that’s what I tend to worry about. I don’t tend to think about responsibility. A matter of fact I tend to like to on occasion pretend I don’t have any responsibilities. I try to remember the last day when I didn’t have anything to do and didn’t have anything to do the following day that I had to do and I had no responsibilities. It was decades ago. I pretend when I want to feel that way. I don’t think in those terms. I think you have a responsibility to do really good stuff and get it out there for people to use and let them build on the shoulders of it and keep making better stuff. So the responsibility is to yourself and your own standards. In our business, one person can’t do anything anymore. You create a team of people around you. You have a responsibility of integrity of work to that team. Everybody does try to turn out the best work that they can. Any final comments or thoughts either for the record or off the record? No. Not really. Well, I cannot tell you how much we appreciate this. Sure, I hope its helpful.

Steve Jobs Interview

The Rebirth of an Addict by Leslie Fieger

It is easy to identify the obvious physical addictions; drugs, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, sugar, etc. In addition to being the easiest to identify, these physical addictions are also the easiest to kick. If you think that kicking the heroin habit is tough, try kicking your addiction to one of your core beliefs. You’ll scream. You’ll fight. You’ll rant and rave. You’ll suffer delirium tremors. In addition to any physical addictions you may admit to having, you also have many emotional, mental and spiritual addictions that may not be so obvious. Physical addictions are often obvious, but is not always so easy to identify the emotional addictions you may have. Nevertheless, we all have them. You can see them if you look closely at your relationships with other people, at the recurring cycles of circumstances that show up in your life, at the things you gather around yourself to provide comfort and pleasure. People who manage to escape one abusive relationship usu-

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ally end up in another one. They are addicted. People who suffer through one emotional or financial crisis after another are not unlucky; they are addicted to the emotional drama. It is even harder to identify the mental addictions you may have. Parents worry about pushers hanging around schoolyards, hoping to entice the innocent into some drug addiction. Yet, within the classrooms, well meaning teachers are busy impressing young minds with ideas and ways of thinking about life. (Read this excellent article written by a “teacher of the year”.) Parents do it too. They infect their children with their ways of thinking, with their attitudes, passing on their own addictions, their own behavioral programming. Most people who have been pro-

grammed do not recognize their programming. Not one person who has been successfully brainwashed will readily admit to being brainwashed. And yet, we have all been, from birth, trained/programmed/brainwashed to think a certain way, to have certain perspectives, to hold a certain reality picture. And we have become addicted to those habitual thought processes, those perspectives, that take on reality. They provide us with pleasure, comfort and security just as much as any needle full of dope does. It is harder still to identify the spiritual addictions you may have. Oh sure, it can be fairly easy to point the finger at those who are involved in cults; but, we are all addicted to belief systems. Each of us has become dependent on holding certain beliefs

in order to have the courage to face the great unknown and the various other fears that arise from that. Resorting to a belief sold by a church in order to face your fears is not much different than resorting to a shot of courage made in a distillery and sold in a saloon. It is easy to be in denial about these emotional, mental and spiritual addictions. Being in denial about them does not mean they do not exist. In fact, the denial that one’s habits are, in fact, an addiction is one of the primary ways to identify an addiction. Everyone who works in addiction therapy has heard a junkie

say, “I am not really addicted. I can quit anytime.” Finally, let me say this: I don’t believe it is possible to be entirely free of addiction. I do believe that it is possible to be free enough to be capable of consciously choosing what addictions I have. I’d much rather be addicted to happiness than to sadness, to pleasure than to pain, to enjoyment than to suffering. I’d much rather be addicted to success than to failure. I’d much rather be addicted to love than to fear. My name is Leslie & I am an addict.

Phoenix Tales

Mind Crush Monday Neil Degrasse Tyson

by Author Name

Neil deGrasse Tyson — astrophysicist, irreverent tweeter, vanquisher of Pluto, frequent Stephen Colbert foil — is America’s “It” Nerd. A lot of people have held that title before, acting as evangelists for science and discovery. Ben Franklin. Our buddy George Washington Carver. Stephen Jay Gould. Carl Sagan. Tyson’s the latest standard-bearer, and two weeks ago he presided over an hourlong meditation on the birth and scope of the universe that was being broadcast on several networks at once. “[The Big Bang] is as far back as we can see in time,” he intoned on Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. He paused for effect. “For now.” Cosmos is an update of the beloved 1980 PBS series of the same name hosted by Sagan. The new edition is full of allusions to the old one. “We are made of star stuff,” Tyson says in the first episode, repeating one of Sagan’s most famous lines. A lot has been made of the fact that decades ago, Sagan — once the “It” Nerd himself — tried unsuccessfully to recruit the teenage Tyson to Cornell University. Tyson’s ascension 32

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to America’s foremost nerd is a testament to his undeniable charisma and ability to make complicated ideas accessible to laypeople. But some of that’s by default, because, really, who else might even be in contention for it? (Bill Nye, perhaps?) But Tyson’s current stature is unlikely for another reason: He’s a black astrophysicist, as elusive a phenomenon as the Higgs boson. Tyson has talked a lot about the casual racism he experienced at UT. (“I was stopped and questioned seven times by University police on my way into the physics building,” he said. “Seven times. Zero times was I stopped going into the gym — and I went to the gym a lot. That says all you need to know about how welcome I felt at Texas.” But he said that race was only at the edges of why he didn’t excel there.) Our play-cousins at Tell Me More have been paying a lot of attention to how underrepresented black folk are in STEM fields, but this is especially pronounced among astrophysicists. In 2012, the astrophysicist J.C. Holbrook tried to conduct a tally, and she could

identify only a few dozen from the last six decades. “Holbrook begins with some startling statistics: since 1955, only forty African-Americans have earned doctorates in astronomy or physics doing an astronomy dissertation. This means they comprise at most 2.47% of PhDs in astronomy. Out of 594 faculty at top 40 astronomy programs, 6 are African-American (1%). Notably, Hispanics fare no better, with 7 (1.2%), while Asians

account for 42 of the 594, for 7.1%.” Holbrook was trying to figure out whether there were some specific strategies that had allowed the black folks who stuck around in the field to thrive. These are questions that Tyson himself has asked. While he sat on a panel for an event a few years ago, a questioner asked if there might be some “genetic reason” why there were so few women in science. That prompted Tyson to wonder aloud while his field looked the way it does. “There are very, very few African-American astrophysics PhDs,” Tyson told Alcalde, an alumni magazine for the University of Texas, Austin, where he studied for a time during graduate school. “That’s for a reason. I was doing something people of my skin color were not supposed to do. So people who believed in me, like Sagan, were important.”

Mind Crush Monday

“We love and therefore, we want — and the subject of our affection will either love and want us in return, or they won’t.”

Heartbroke Blues An Article on Unrequited Love

by Erica Schultz

The problem with unrequited love — well, one of the problems — is that our holding onto it essentially renders us non-contenders in pursuit of the real thing. When we love, we love in broad, all-consuming strokes, filling the space between the dotted lines so completely that we unknowingly present ourselves as a whole image, regardless of all we know to be missing. It’s in our body language, it’s in our tone of voice, it’s in our energy. We become unavailable. You see, there’s only so much room in one’s heart for such unbridled passion, and potential lovers pick up on the crowdedness. Flippant as it sounds, we’re all just looking for a vacant space to park our little “I think I can” hearts; and when we see a “no vacancy” sign, we keep on moving. Our love, though unrequited, is valid. We need to understand this in order to overcome it; learn to respect the power of our emotions as infinitely beautiful, special and unique to our human experience. Nobody else has ever found the exact same, nuanced beauty in this one, particular face. Nobody

else has their criteria for perfection lie so surely on the dip of this lower back, the crinkle of this smile, the gap between these teeth. Your bond, while emotionally unrewarding in its non-reciprocation, is as strong a connection as anything that’s existed before you. You feel it to be so, and so it is. Love will never be solved, worked out, fully understood — there is no secret angle, key or elusive password leading to a definitive answer. In fact, I suspect a man on his deathbed, with an entire lifetime of experience and worldly insight, would consider love with as much understanding as my 8 year-old cousin might contemplate a schoolyard crush. It’s universal, transcendent of time and place; it connects us. We love and therefore, we want — and the subject of our affection will either love and want us in return, or they won’t. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. To let go of unrequited love is as difficult as it is necessary. Too often we attempt to move on by shifting our feelings onto another person, transferring our emotional baggage into a new basHeartbroke Blues

ket with the hope that it’ll hold. The problem with this approach is that we essentially leave a long, broken trail of loose ends, scattered unforgivingly behind us. Love is non-transferable, non-refundable, and unavoidable; you must walk through it, not around it. To move on from an experience we subconsciously require an ending point, a marker, some form of memorialization. And for a feeling to be memorialized, we must first give it a chance to live, breathe and be appreciated for what it truly is. After all, something cannot die without first being alive. So don’t repress it, don’t hold it down, don’t dismiss your love as a triviality of youth. Forego any feelings of resentment or floundering self-worth, for it pays you — and your heart — no service. Perhaps you should try writing it down on a postit note. “I love ______” – followed by – “______ does not love me.” It’ll hurt to see the truth, as solid and tangible as it is temporary, lying there before you. Stick it on your bathroom mirror, look at it every night as you brush your teeth, see the reality for what it is; let it grow old and wither — like a polaroid photograph fading under the unforgiving midday sun. You’ll pass it every morning until it one day slips to the floor, while your at work or in the shower, and becomes nothing more than another simple, fluorescent piece of paper. At first, all wounds hurt, but then they scab, and the scabs heal, and soon, there is new skin. With time, you’ll stop noticing the ache because the

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ache will not be there any more. Unrequited love will always be painful, but with the necessary time, respect, and understanding, your heart will soon become available once more. Your love will move on; not with a bang, but a whimper. It occurred to me the other day that there might be people in this world who have never known unrequited love, have never fallen for someone who didn’t fall too. I know it’s rarer than a solar eclipse, but it seems likely that some have managed it; people who married their high school sweetheart, who got it right on the first try, who were seemingly born with enough innate confidence to walk right up to the object of their affection and say, “I think you’re great, would you like to go on a date sometime” and whose confidence was rewarded with a resolute, “Absolutely, I’d love to” and a Happily Ever After. The rest of us would be inclined to murder a couple like this if we ever came across them, but I maintain that they are the ones who are missing out. Everyone should fall for someone who doesn’t love them back at least once. People who don’t love you can be found in many places. Pick the person in a brand new relationship; they can’t see more than five inches past the face of their new love, let alone far enough to see you pining away in the corner. Pick the girl you’ve been friends with for ages, the one who refers to you as a brother and will never see you as anything else. Pick the boy who flirts with everyone, sleeps with everyone, the one who doesn’t know what he’s looking for and never seems satisfied. He’ll do just fine, too. This has to be more than a crush, more than just a fleeting attraction. Thinking they look cute when they smile, or letting your imagination momentarily wander when they touch your skin isn’t enough. You must love them with every fiber of your being, from the moment you wake up until the moment you fall asleep, day after heartbroken day. Memorize the rhythm and cadence of their voice, the subtle gestures of their hands and each expression of their face, so when you’re asleep and dreaming of a world in which you’re together, it seems real. Feel your soul fracture each morning when you wake up and realize it isn’t.

Let the agony, the obsession, consume you. Nothing hurts quite as exquisitely as loving someone who doesn’t love you back. Perhaps you think I’m crazy for suggesting anyone let themselves fall into this pit of despair, that I’m an emotional sadist of the worst variety. But darling reader, I assure you I’m not, because eventually something happens to every single person who loves someone who doesn’t love them back: they manage to stop being in love. While it takes varying amounts of time, everyone finds their breaking point, that moment when enough becomes enough. It could be the third night you cry yourself to sleep, the fifth time they cancel plans with you to be with someone else, or the eighth night in a row you spend getting drunk alone. It can take months, or even years. But here’s what you’ll have once you get there: After surviving that kind of ache, you’ll be so much stronger, so much more certain of yourself. You’ll see that all pain (physical, emotional, and mental) is a temporary state of being, not a permanent one. There is always a reason to go on, always a reason to fight for yourself. You’ll realize that because you are not loved by one does not mean you are not loved by all. You’ll understand that love cannot be won like a teddy bear at the fair; cannot be stolen like a rare painting from a museum in the dead of night. You’ll see that real love comes first from within, not from anyone else. You learn that those annoying people who say things like, “real love comes from within” were telling you the truth this whole time, but you had to learn it for yourself. Don’t worry – you don’t need to tell them they were right. Getting over unrequited love feels like having a blindfold removed – you suddenly see all the love you’ve had in your life this whole time, and you’ll appreciate those individuals like never before. You will be humbled, you will be grateful, you will be wiser. Here’s the best part, though, about getting over someone who doesn’t love you: you realize that nobody healed your heartache, that you were able to fix yourself all on your own. And once you’ve proven to yourself that you can recover from that, you won’t be afraid to go looking for love again. And again, and again and again. And

one of those times, you’re bound to be rewarded with someone who reciprocates every ounce of your unbridled affection, who loves you just as much as you love them, and that will be the most supreme feeling of ecstasy you can fathom. You’ll see that loving someone who didn’t love you back was totally worth it. My first serious boyfriend, in my teens, was a guy I chased for months. I fell in love, or maybe I decided I was in love—I was very excited about the idea—and went after my smartest dude friend, who was inconveniently in love with someone else. There followed months of hookups during which he refused to call this thing a “relationship” or, in fact, talk about it at all. I spent days asking him about his unrequited love, supporting him in his projects, sleeping with him, and then slipping out of his bed and going home to cry and listen to “As The World Falls Down” or “#1 Crush.” My grades tanked, partly because he liked to skip class, so of course I skipped class with him. After maybe a year of that we broke up and I dated someone else; six months into that, my first boyfriend got in touch to tell me he was in love with me. I cried some more, told him it was too late, and it was another six months before we got back together. I was a bit nervous, but also a bit triumphant. In a way, I’d played a long game and won, right? Except no. The frame of our relationship had been set, and it’s really hard to change that once it’s established; even harder when you’re inexperienced. I was still in the pursuer role, and certain imbalances remained. Although he treated me better as the years went on, he never came close to treating me as well as any other boyfriend has treated me. On the bright side (?), when I finally broke up with him years later, he was devastated. This experience made me a bit pathological about avoiding the “chaser” role in a relationship. And to be sure, I’ve had some awesomely well-balanced relationships. But I’ve still occasionally ended up in situations with an affection mismatch—sometimes “in my favor,” but sometimes not. The latter sometimes after the guy went after me first, and then the balance of affection shifted after we dated for a while. The worst breakup of my life was like that: He

tried to get my attention for almost a year before we dated, and then after he dumped me, I did my absolute best to stop talking to him, to distract myself, to fill up my time, to rely on my friends for support, to make exciting plans, to date awesome guys. Yet months later, I found myself sitting across from him platonically, trading jokes and watching him laugh, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach as I realized that watching him smile—still—felt more fulfilling than anything else in the world. I knew I was still so obsessed, but I couldn’t walk away and cauterize the wound. In situations like these, one thinks, I must be getting something out of it if I’m sticking around, even though it feels like it’s killing me. Well, yes: I must. But human brains are terrible at weighing short-term vs. long-term incentives. His smile was the shortest-term of incentives, yet it was still the most powerful feeling in my life. I’m kind of amazed that I eventually managed to walk away. When you are feeling the low vibrations of unrequited love, don’t go chasing after it from other people. STOP, check in within yourself and be still. If you seek out the path of trying to fill yourself up from other people or substances, you will only make it worse. Take care of yourself. Do you! Stay in your power and do things that nurture your heart and soul. This is what I mean when I say, “The only unrequited love that truly exists is towards ourselves.” When we love ourselves, we are not seeking others to fill us and we are free to detach and welcome in the perfect person in the perfect time. And in the meantime, we fill ourselves up so that we have the serenity and joy – so we can step into savoring the waiting, instead of dreading it. Feeling unrequited love today? Take your power back, love yourself and watch it go away.

Heartbroke Blues

The Science of First Impressions Youtube Celebrities

by Author Name

It takes just a quick glance, maybe three seconds, for someone to evaluate you when you meet for the first time. In this short time, the other person forms an opinion about you based on your appearance, your body language, your demeanor, your mannerisms, and how you are dressed. With every new encounter, you are evaluated and yet another person’s impression of you is formed. These first impression can be nearly impossible to reverse or undo, making those first encounters extremely important, for they set the tone for all the relationships that follows. So, whether they are in your career or social life, it’s important to know how to create a good first impression. This article provides some useful tips to help you do this. Be on Time; someone you are meeting for the first time is not interested in your “good excuse” for running late. Plan to arrive a few minutes early. And allow flexibility for possible delays in traffic or taking a wrong turn. Arriving early is much better that arriving late, hands down, and is the first step in creating a great first 38

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impression. Be Yourself, Be at Ease; if you are feeling uncomfortable and on edge, this can make the other person ill at ease and that’s a sure way to create the wrong impression. If you are calm and confident, so the other person will feel more at ease, and so have a solid foundation for making that first impression a good one. See our section on relaxation techniques to find out how to calm that adrenaline! Present yourself appropriately; of course physical appearance matters. The person you are meeting for the first time does not know you and your appearance is usually the first clue he or she has to go on. But it certainly does not mean you need to look like a model to create a strong and positive first impression. (Unless you are interviewing with your local model agency, of course!) No. The key to a good impression is to present yourself appropriately. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and so the “picture” you first present says much about you to the person you are meeting. Is your appearance saying the right things to help create

the right first impression? Start with the way you dress. What is the appropriate dress for the meeting or occasion? In a business setting, what is the appropriate business attire? Suit, blazer, casual? And ask yourself what the person you’ll be meeting is likely to wear – if your contact is in advertising or the music industry, a pinstripe business suit may not strike the right note! For business and social meetings, appropriate dress also varies between countries and cultures, so it’s something that you should pay particular attention to when in an unfamiliar setting or country. Make sure you know the traditions and norms. And what about your grooming? Clean and tidy appearance is appropriate for most business and social occasions. A good haircut or shave. Clean and tidy clothes. Neat and tidy make up. Make sure your grooming is appropriate and helps make you feel “the part”. Appropriate dressing and grooming help make a good first impression and also help you feel “the part”, and so feel more calm and confident. Add all of this up and you are well on your way to creating a good first impression. A word about individuality; the good news is you can usually create a good impression without total conformity or losing your individuality. Yes, to make a good first impression you do need to “fit in” to some degree. But it all goes back to being appropriate for the situation. If in a business setting, wear appropriate business attire. If at a formal evening social event, wear appropriate evening attire. And express your individuality appropriately within that context. A Winning Smile; as the saying goes, “Smile and the world smiles too.” So there’s nothing like a smile to create a good first impression. A warm and confident smile will put both you and the other person at ease. So smiling is a winner when it comes to great first impressions. But don’t go overboard with this – people who take this too far can seem insincere and smarmy, or can be seen to be “lightweights.” Be open and confident; when it comes to making the first impression, body language as well as appearance speaks much louder than words. Use your body language to project appropriate confidence and self-assurance.

Stand tall, smile (of course), make eye contact, greet with a firm handshake. All of this will help you project confidence and encourage both you and the other person to feel better at ease. Almost everyone gets a little nervous when meeting someone for the first time, which can lead to nervous habits or sweaty palms. By being aware of your nervous habits, you can try to keep them in check. And controlling a nervous jitter or a nervous laugh will give you confidence and help the other person feel at ease. Again, see our section on relaxation techniques for help with this. Small talk goes a long way; conversations are based on verbal give and take. It may help you to prepare questions you have for the person you are meeting for the first time beforehand. Or, take a few minutes to learn something about the person you meet for the first time before you get together. For instance, does he play golf? Does she work with a local charitable foundation? Is there anything that you know of that you have in common with the person you are meeting? If so, this can be a great way to open the conversation and to keep it flowing. Be positive; your attitude shows through in everything you do. Project a positive attitude, even in the face of criticism or in the case of nervousness. Strive to learn from your meeting and to contribute appropriately, maintaining an upbeat manner and a smile. Be courteous and attentive; it goes without saying that good manners and polite, attentive and courteous behavior

help make a good first impression. In fact, anything less can ruin the one chance you have at making that first impression. So be on your best behavior! One modern manner worth mentioning is “turn off your mobile phone”. What first impression will you create if you are already speaking to someone other than the person you are meeting for the first time? Your new acquaintance deserves 100% of your attention. Anything less and you’ll create a less than good first impression. Key Points: You have just a few seconds to make a good first impression and it’s almost impossible ever to change it. So it’s worth giving each new encounter your best shot. Much of what you need to do to make a good impression is common sense. But with a little extra thought and preparation, you can hone your intuitive style and make every first impression not just good but great.

J.K. ROWLING An interview with the creator of Harry Potter

by Mark Litle

id you make up the plot in every aspect first by charting the characters and knowing exactly what you would do with them, or did you just piece a lot of it together as you wrote?  I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write. It’s more fun.Do you now or have you in the past kept a journal? If so, do you believe that it helps in your writing?  I’ve never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks. I get bored with my life. I prefer inventing things. What is Nearly Headless Nick’s last name?   It’s in Book I: De Mimsy-Porpington. Why does Professor Dumbledore like sherbet lemons?   Because I like sherbet lemons! And he’s got good taste. :-) What do you think has been your greatest experience since Harry? The last American tour. Because for the first time I realized how many children love Harry. It was a moving experience for me. What makes some witches/wizards become ghosts after they die?

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You don’t really find that out until Book VII, but I can say that the happiest people do not become ghosts. As you might guess, Moaning Myrtle! How long have you been writing?   As far back as I can remember. The first story I finished was when I was 6 years old. What would your advice be to any other young people that would want to write stories?   The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary. And it’s a lot of fun! And also, start by writing about things you know — your own experiences, your own feelings. That’s what I do. What did the Potter parents do for a living before Voldemort killed them?  I’m sorry to keep saying this, but I can’t tell you because it’s important to a later plot. But you will find out! If there are only seven years of Hogwarts, why is sixth-year Marcus Flint in the third book?   He had to do a year again! :-) How do students at Hogwarts get ed-

ucated in Muggle subjects? They can choose to study Muggle subjects. In the third book, Hermione takes the class Muggles Studies, and that’s where they learn about Muggles in school. Since Harry Potter’s parents were sorcerers and Petunia was Harry’s mother’s sister. Shouldn’t Petunia be a witch or wizard?   No. As Hagrid explains in Book I, sometimes a witch or a wizard occurs in an otherwise Muggle family, just as a Squib is a non-magic person who occurs in an otherwise magic family. Do you think that you will write about Harry after he graduates from Hogwarts? No, there’s no University for Wizards. At the moment I’m only planning to write seven Harry Potter books. I won’t say “never,” but I have no plans to write an eighth book. Will we ever get a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher who lasts more than a year?   I’m not telling you. ;-) Is Harry Potter ever going to fall in love with Hermione or is he going to

fall in love with Ginny Weasley?   In Book IV Harry does decide he likes a girl, but it’s not Hermione or Ginny. However, he’s only 14, so there’s plenty of time for him to change his mind. ;-) If you had to choose one teacher from your books to teach your child, who would it be and why? It would be Professor Lupin, because he is kind, clever, and gives very interesting lessons. How many countries have you visited since writing Harry Potter?  Um...let me think. Spain, Italy, France, America. That’s all. I will be visiting lots more, but because my daughter’s still so young, I don’t like to travel too much. Unless I can take her with me. Will Harry ever get a break and not live with the Dursleys?   I’m not going to tell you! ;-) Will we ever see Scabbers again?   Yes. You will see Scabbers again. Will Harry ever get to go with his godfather (Cornelius Black)?   He is in contact with Sirius Black in Book IV, but as Sirius is on the run,

it’s difficult for them to be together at the moment. Is it true you’re doing seven books, one for each year that Harry will be at Hogwarts?   Yes, it is true. Do you have an actual floorplan for Hogwarts? Do you use it when writing the books?  I haven’t drawn it, because it would be difficult for the most skilled architect to draw, owing to the fact that the staircases and the rooms keep moving. However, I have a very vivid mental image of what it looks like. What made you think of the people’s names and dormitories at Hogwarts? I invented the names of the Houses on the back of an airplane sick bag! This is true. I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character. Do you take real people you know and put them in your books?   The closest I’ve come to putting a real

J.K. Rowling

person in my books is with Gilderoy Lockhart, who is an exaggeration of someone I once knew. John Weasley is a little bit like my oldest friend, a man I was at school with, whose name is Sean. But neither of them are accurate portraits. How long does it take to write one Harry Potter book?   It depends. The quickest, so far, was a year. How does it feel to know that millions of kids are reading your books? Amazing! I don’t think I really realized how many there were until I visited the States and met thousands and thousands of people at book signings. How did you come up with Harry? Harry just sort of strolled into my head, on a train journey. He arrived very fully formed. It was as though I was meeting him for the first time. Why are the gnomes bad?   Gnomes eat the roots of your plants, and make little heaps of earth, like moles do. They are also a bit of a giveaway that wizards live in a house. Did you ever meet a boy like Harry?   I probably met a boy like Harry, since I’ve been meeting readers of the Harry books. But he wasn’t based on anyone real. Are any of your female characters, like Hermione, modeled after your own daughter?   No, if Hermione was based on anyone, she was based on me when I was younger. But my daughter is turning out to be a bit like me, so she is a bit like Hermione. :-) Was there a particular teacher who encouraged you to write when you were a child? If there was, how did he or she encourage or help you?   I had some wonderful teachers, but I never confided that I wanted to be a writer. So, no. Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don’t think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it. Where were you born and what was your childhood like?   I was born in a place called Chipping, so perhaps that explains my love of silly names. How can two Muggles have a kid with magical powers? Also how does the Ministry of Magic find out these kids have powers?   It’s the same as two black-haired 42

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people producing a redheaded child. Sometimes these things just happen, and no one really knows why! The Ministry of Magic doesn’t find out which children are magic. In Hogwarts there’s a magical quill which detects the birth of a magical child, and writes his or her name down in a large parchment book. Every year Professor McGonagall checks the book, and sends owls to the people who are turning 11. How many languages is the book published in?  Oh goodness! Twenty-five, I think! Would you get a mythical pet from one of your books? If you could, which one?   If I could, I would choose a Phoenix, because they have such useful properties, as Harry finds out in Book III. Why did you choose the lightning bolt as a trademark for Harry Potter? Just because I decided that it would be an interesting mark. Do you still write in cafes, or do you have to stay out of public places while you write so people won’t bother you?  I still write in cafes, but I go to different ones now! Is the island that Azkaban is on located at the southern end of the U.K. since Black had to pass the Dursleys’s place on his way to Hogwarts?   No, he didn’t have to pass the Dursleys’s place. He just wanted to. Who is your favorite character?   I love Harry, Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, and Professor Lupin. How old is Professor Dumbledore?   Wizards have a longer life expectancy than Muggles! When the seventh book in the series is finished, are you going to start on

a new topic?   Yes, but what it is, I don’t yet know! What would you think if a person made one of your Harry Potter books into a computer game? I’d like to play it! How do you visualize Hogwarts? A huge, rambling, quite scary-looking castle, with a jumble of towers and battlements. Like the Weasleys’ house, it isn’t a building that Muggles could build, because it is supported by magic. Were you ever involved in a school like Harry Potter’s school?   No, I wish I had been! :-) Would you ever want to consider another job if you had the opportunity? No. I’m doing the thing I love best in the world! Although I did enjoy being a teacher. :-) Do you already have titles for all seven Harry Potters?   Yes, I do. And I’m not going to tell you what they are. ;-) Does your daughter help you with ideas for the books?   No, the ideas are all my own. But my daughter does love the books. :-) Who is you favorite author?   Jane Austen. I find her un-put-downable. :-) What kind of books did you read when you were young?   My favorite books when I was young-

er were by Paul Gallico, Elizabeth Goodge, and E. Nesbitt. When you were stuck on the train was there anything that triggered your imagination, and did that incident inspire Book III?   I have no idea where the idea came from, it just fell into my head! Scholastic says: We are almost out of time. Ms. Rowling, thank you so much for joining us. Do you have any parting words you would like to share with our audience?   Don’t let the Muggles get you down! :-)

J.K. Rowling