In 2010 (one year before he died) Steve Jobs wrote an email to himself. His wife found it a few years later and submitted it to his public archive.
Here’s the email:
I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
I do not make any of my own clothing.
I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being.
I think about this letter all the time. On the surface, it’s an acknowledgment we are not self-sufficient. We rely on the collective knowledge, creativity, and labor of others. Not just to survive, but to feel moved and alive.
It’s especially moving coming from one of history’s most important innovators. Did Steve Jobs think about this often? Or was it only near the end of his life that he understood his individual achievements were made possible by the collective efforts of others?
There’s an undeniable irony in that humans have a driving need to feel self-sufficient while slowly being forced to accept we never have been and never will be.
From a writing perspective (a theme of this newsletter) the email is a masterclass in delivering a range of emotions in plain English. Gratitude and sadness sit by side in his words. There is empathy, grace, and (maybe I’m projecting here) a hint of regret.
The undertone of helplessness is hard to ignore, given that Jobs wrote it only to himself in the final round of an 8-year cancer battle he’d soon lose. To me, the email is an oil painting of a Silicon Valley Tech God, hunched over an Apple keyboard, conceding that even after everything he’s accomplished, he’s just like the rest of us: fragile and mortal.
The beauty in the letter comes from the realization that nothing great happens in isolation. There is no “doing it on your own.” Civilization is and always has been one great collaboration.
With that beauty comes the sadness of acceptance. Acceptance that even with the collective—even with all the wealth and power and access one could ever hope for—we are all subject to the whims of fate and mortality.
Ok.. ahem.. well, now that we’re all feeling bright and chipper!
Tell me, what do you think of or feel when you read Steve Jobs’s email to himself? I wrote this email on a MacBook. Are you reading it on an iPhone? That’s some full-circle stuff…
Steve Job’s email has meant different things to me at different times, so try and forget what I think about it and tell me what it meant to you in the comments below.
The temperature is mortal and frail and cannot do it without you… 🔥
-Corey
His email is so good… self-sufficiency versus asking for support has been a big theme coming up lately. Allowing your facade to fade and having humility to ask for help is not always easy, especially when it feels like you have built an image of strength, so this just reminds me that connection is essential to all of us in whatever form that looks like.