Chapter 11 Section 4 Hippies with Pursuits

In 1972, after graduating from high school, Jobs "must" go to college.This "must" has a history.Jobs himself told the whole story to the public for the first time in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. When Jobs was born in 1955, his biological parents, Abdul Fattah Jandali and Joanne Simpson, intended to put him in foster care with a highly educated lawyer.Unexpectedly, the lawyer changed his mind temporarily and hoped to adopt a girl.Paul Jobs was lucky enough to get the opportunity to adopt this unique talent.But Jobs' biological parents soon learned that Paul Jobs and his wife, Clara Jobs, had never received higher education.This made it difficult for Jobs' biological parents, who refused to sign the adoption contract.In the end, Paul Jobs solemnly promised Jobs' biological parents that he would let the child go to college in the future, and the two parties reached an adoption agreement.

Reed University is Jobs' own school of choice, located in Portland, Oregon.Earlier, Jobs had visited a friend at Reed University.Apparently, there must have been something about that trip to college that attracted the rebellious young man.After he came back from Reed University, he never put other universities in his eyes.He told his father, Paul Jobs, directly, "I have to go to Reed." Paul Jobs was intimidated by the high cost of tuition at Reed University. "Can we go to a cheaper college, or a college closer to home?" The father tried to discuss with his son. "But I just want to go to that university. If I can't get in, I won't go anywhere." Jobs showed his stubbornness when he asked his father to move to change his middle school.

Paul Jobs compromised again, perhaps because of the promise he made to Jobs’ biological parents when he adopted Jobs, or because of his love for Jobs. In short, his father drove his son to Portland, and Jobs got what he wanted. God knows why Jobs liked Reed University at the time, anyway, it was definitely not because of the teaching environment here.In fact, Jobs only attended the school for one semester, and he simply went through the withdrawal procedures.To be honest, from the first day Jobs arrived at Reed, his mind was not on reading. Reed University is known for its open-mindedness, and the campus itself is a distribution center for all kinds of popular ideas and rebellious behaviors.When Jobs was in school, the United States had just experienced the baptism of ideological emancipation, and various trends of thought such as hippies, the beat generation, psychedelic drugs, and avant-garde art were colliding and merging.

In 1999, a film about the entrepreneurial journey of Jobs and Gates called "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (Pirates of Silicon Valley) reproduced the era of Jobs and Woz for us at the beginning.In the movie, "Jobs" who was still in middle school and "Woz" who was studying in Berkeley witnessed the demonstrations of students and the intervention and arrest of the police on the university campus.The two older children shouted excitedly while running and dodging in the chaotic crowd. The movie "Silicon Valley Legend" itself is full of artistic processing and fabricated elements, but the atmosphere and emotions of the times reflected in the movie are true.Woz in the real world later commented on the film: "Although the characters, times, and places are often wrong in the film, the characters are accurate. When I saw the tear gas and chaos at the beginning of the film, I exclaimed : 'My God! That's what it was like back then!'"

At Reed University, the hippies even found a place called "Apple Orchard" (Apple Orchard) and turned it into a paradise for rebellious culture.When Jobs, young and maverick, arrived in Reed, he was like a young sprout discovering fertile soil, and suddenly found his favorite life. Like all hippies of the era, Jobs listened to Bob Dylan ballads and Beatles rock, and read "Beat" poet Allen Ginsberg Howlist poems, reciting quotes from Timo-thy Leary, the godfather of hippies, hanging out on campus in ripped clothes, making friends with similar interests, picking up girls with boys, Alcoholism, the wicked pleasure of experimenting with LSD and other drugs... It took him only one semester to discover that his purpose in coming to Reed was not to read, but to experience.When he resolutely dropped out of school, he didn't know his own life experience, nor did he know what promise his adoptive father had made to his biological parents.

The opening of Reed University did not come in vain.Even people like Jobs who went through the formalities of withdrawing from school after a few days of schooling were not rejected by the school.They actually allowed Jobs to stay in school, and if he had a whim one day, he could go to the classroom to sit in on the class. Jobs later said: "I decided to drop out and thought it would work. I was really scared at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The moment I dropped out, I Finally, instead of taking required courses that didn’t interest me at all, I began to drop in on more interesting courses.”

Of course, after dropping out of school, there will be no dormitory to live in. Food and housing have become issues that the hippie Jobs must consider.He first rented a house in a nearby residential area, and when money was tight, he simply slept on the floor of his classmates' dormitory.He sometimes has to pick up Coke bottles for money to fill his stomach, or walk about 7 miles on Sundays to eat a weekly free meal at a temple.At Reed, Jobs lived a true bum life. When the usual Jobs biographies talk about this period, they always deliberately exaggerate the characteristics of Jobs as a hippie. Few people really notice that Jobs has an obvious characteristic compared with those hippies who only know unprincipled rebellion and pursuit of alternative life—— —He's an aspiring hippie.

"I loved that life," Jobs said. "I followed my intuition and my curiosity, and a lot of what I experienced then turned out to be invaluable." At Reed University, when most punks were addicted to alcohol, drugs and lust, Jobs found his ideological support-Zen.That's right, it's Zen in Buddhism.Of course, although the Zen Buddhism that Jobs practiced at Reed University can barely be regarded as a branch of Zen Buddhism inherited from the Sixth Patriarch, it is still far from the familiar Zen Buddhism of China, which "points directly at the heart and becomes a Buddha by seeing one's nature". .

The introductory book for Jobs to learn Zen is "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" written in English by the Japanese Zen master Shunlong Suzuki.Tracing back to the origin, Shunryu Suzuki can be regarded as the descendant of the Soto sect in Japan, one of the five southern schools of Zen. In 1959, Zen master Shunryu Suzuki arrived in the United States. Based on the words of the Sixth Patriarch, "Although people have north and south, Buddha-nature has no north and south", he determined to teach Americans who have no foundation in Buddhism to practice Zen and promote Buddhism. "The Beginning Mind of a Zen Man" is an English primer written by Zen Master Shunlong Suzuki for those Americans who know nothing about Buddhism.

Teaching Americans Zen is no easy task.Zen Master Shunlong Suzuki has his own teaching method which is easy to understand.Once, an American student asked Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki why the Japanese teacups are so delicate and delicate that they are easily broken by careless Americans.Zen master Shunlong Suzuki replied: "It's not that they are too delicate, but that you don't know how to master it. You have to adjust yourself according to the situation, rather than asking the environment to match you." Because of cultural differences, few Americans can really understand the mystery of Zen.But there is no doubt that Jobs was one of the rare exceptions.Zen does not pay attention to scriptures, does not pay attention to red tape, does not advocate tedious speculation, "everything is only the mind, and all dharmas are only consciousness", and pays attention to the sudden enlightenment from the heart.This way of thinking is in line with Jobs's disposition.From "The First Mind of a Zen Man", Jobs saw an ideal world that is clean, clear, and free to let the mind walk.

Because of his pursuit, during his time at Reed University, Jobs always went to the classroom to attend courses that were useful to him according to his interests, such as English calligraphy.He later said: "If I hadn't audited English calligraphy classes in college, the Macintosh computer wouldn't have so many beautiful, well-proportioned typefaces." It has to be said that the various geniuses that Jobs later displayed at Apple, including his unique strategic thinking and artistic and beautiful product design, have more or less the shadow of his previous Zen enlightenment.As stated in "The Beginning Mind of a Zen Master": "In everything we do, we are expressing our inner nature. It is the only purpose of our existence." Perhaps, Jobs has been practicing these words of Suzuki Shunryu Zen Master throughout his life. Woz had finished his junior year at Berkeley while Jobs was wandering while studying Zen at Reed University. In January 1973, Woz found a job that all engineers dreamed of at the time-designing calculators at Hewlett-Packard. In Woz's mind, HP is a perfect workplace, with a beautiful office environment, where countless technical geniuses gather to discuss issues, with the coolest electronic equipment and the best computers.When he entered Hewlett-Packard, he told himself that this was a place worth working for a lifetime. Whether it was during school or at Hewlett-Packard, Woz was not interested in the hippie culture prevailing in society at that time.He felt that he and those hippies were not the same kind of people at all.He never touched drugs, and he wasn't even drunk until he was 30.His shy and introverted personality allows him to concentrate more time and energy on engineering technology. In early 1974, Jobs finally left Reed University and returned home to Los Altos.This is not because he is tired of the life of hippies and Zen side by side, but because he has a bigger ideal in his mind-he wants to raise a sum of money, and then go on a pilgrimage to India to study more profound Dharma. In order to raise money, he had to find a job.But, who would want a hippie who has only spent two or three years fooling around on a college campus without studying at all?From a newspaper advertisement, Jobs found a company he liked.This company is called Atari (Atari), which is the first company in the United States to develop video game consoles. Many classic arcade machines from around 1970 to 1980 were created by Atari. Jobs walked into Atari and lied to the company's engineers that he was working on Hewlett-Packard's calculator.That tone, as if he was working at HP.Atari was short of manpower at the time, and without verifying what Jobs said was true or false, they offered him a temporary job at $5 an hour. Although Jobs had no formal education in electronics, with his clever mind, he actually qualified for the work of an engineer at Atari, and was responsible for debugging game consoles before leaving the factory at Atari.After saving enough money, Jobs took a leave of absence from the company and traveled to Europe and India with his best buddies from college. The trip to India left an unforgettable impression on Jobs.For the first time, he saw countless poor people working hard in the city and in the fields.The street is full of homeless people dressed like hippies.The difference is that the American hippies are pursuing a rebellious lifestyle, while the poor in India are forced to live helplessly.Jobs discovered that those who labored in the fields were using primitive agricultural tools thousands of years old.Apart from practicing Zen and seeking Buddhahood, this is probably the biggest achievement Jobs made during his trip to India.For the first time, Jobs really felt how much a useful tool would help people's lives.He felt that he could do something for this world, and a dream was slowly emerging in his mind: "I want to change the world!"