Chapter 62 Section 2 Hippies or Ascetics

It's hard to imagine, how can a person take drugs and listen to rock, and at the same time linger in the Zen heart language that makes the forest quieter with the noise of cicadas, and the mountains with birdsong become more secluded?How can a CEO who often yells at employees and threatens media reporters at every turn ask a Zen master to be the spiritual mentor of employees when starting a business?Why would a Geschizhe who is fearless in the face of failure and has repeatedly used technology to change the world say "I am willing to use all my technology in exchange for a chance to spend an afternoon with Socrates"?

Is Jobs more of a rebel, or more of a monk? Zen Buddhism says that all appearances are right and wrong.Perhaps, whether it is a hippie or an ascetic, from the perspective of Zen, which is clear and discerning, there is no difference at all. As long as it comes from the nature, it is natural to "come and go freely, universal without stagnation". If Jobs was not a man of temperament, no one in this world would dare to say the word "temperament".The habits and hobbies corresponding to those strong personalities are actually the most interesting things about Jobs. For example, because of learning Zen, Jobs has always pursued "fish vegetarianism", eating only fish and vegetarian food, and specially invited chefs for this purpose, and transformed the cafeteria of Apple headquarters into a tofu atmosphere.In the Jobs home, with minimal furniture, everything seemed set up for a retreat.

In different periods, Jobs' dress is almost a model of several different eras.When I was young, I either had long hair, T-shirts, shorts, and sandals like a hippie, or I wore a gray trench coat with shirts and trousers like Brother Ma, all of which were the most "fashionable" fashion features of that era.As he grew older, Jobs, who appeared in public, almost invariably encapsulated himself in the famous "turtle neck shirt" and jeans. At this time, Jobs was more like an unfathomable philosopher. But in real life, Jobs was a big kid.For a while, Jobs liked a Porsche watch, which he wore on his wrist every day to show off.If someone noticed his watch and praised it in person, Jobs would take the watch off his wrist and give it to the other person on the spot, saying, "Congratulations, you know how to appreciate this excellent design." After that, he conjured a piece out of nowhere and put it on his wrist.In fact, this magic trick is not very difficult. Jobs bought a whole box of these watches worth about $2,000 each in advance, gave one as a gift, and took another one out of the box to wear.

Former Apple board member Peter Crisp (Peter Crisp) recalled that when Apple first went public, financial tycoon David Rockefeller (David Rockefeller) organized a party at his home to celebrate Apple’s successful listing and invited Apple executives Attended with many famous investors and bankers.Unexpectedly, Jobs took many Apple engineers to the party.Apparently, Jobs himself and these engineers, who never knew what the rules were, regarded this gathering as a birthday party on the beach on the weekend. Many people brought toys and colorful Apple logo stickers with them, making the Rockefeller house smoky.Afterwards, Rockefeller complained to Crisp: "Next time, please tell them not to put a logo on the mirror in my bathroom."

Jobs loved to drive and has been driving around in the family's old car since high school.In recent years, Jobs has been driving a Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG to haunt Silicon Valley.When Jobs bought the car, it cost about $130,000. I have to say that Jobs has two major characteristics in driving. The first is to never install the license plate.It is said that since the Macintosh era, Jobs has the habit of not having a license plate.When the police came to question him, he always said that because he was a celebrity, his license plate would be stolen every day, so he might as well not pretend.For this reason, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) gave him permission to go on the road without a license plate-this is really cool.Once, the author and my friends were wandering in Palo Alto, and found a somewhat familiar silver-gray unlicensed Mercedes parked outside the villa on the roadside. Only then did I realize that we had already walked to the door of Mr. Joe’s house.At this moment, Jobs' wife, Laurenna, came out of the door. Seeing our group of uninvited guests who looked like paparazzi, she waved and smiled at us friendly.

The second is to frequently park in Apple's disabled parking spaces.Andy Herzfeld witnessed this phenomenon when he was on the Macintosh team.Later, more people took photos of Jobs parking the unlicensed Da Benz in the disabled parking space.Hertzfeld joked: "Jobs may have felt that the symbol of the little man in a wheelchair painted on the parking space for the disabled is implying that it is reserved for the chairman of the company. people')." Jean-Louis Casey, a Frenchman who witnessed Jobs parking his car in a disabled parking space, said sarcastically: "I didn't expect that the disabled parking space is for people with such emotional disabilities."

In addition to eating fish and vegetarian food, wearing "turtle neck shirts" and driving unlicensed Mercedes, Jobs also liked to demolish houses.That's right, I was talking about demolishing the house. In 1984, Jobs bought a 1,600-square-meter, 14-bedroom mansion in Woodside, California.The house, called Jackling House, is a Spanish Colonial Revival style building designed by the famous California architect George Washington Smith and built in 1926. For a long-standing country, this mansion is definitely a historical and cultural heritage. Jobs lived in the house on and off for 10 years. After marrying Laurenna in 1991, he gave the house as a gift to his wife. After Jobs and his wife moved to their new home in Palo Alto in 1993, they stopped living at the Jacklin Mansion. In 1998, it was lent to US President Bill Clinton for one use.

Jobs clearly disliked the architectural style of the Jacklin Mansion.He said the house was "one of the most repulsive buildings he has ever seen".Since 2000, he has stopped renovating and cleaning the house, allowing the Jacklin mansion to decline day by day. In 2004, Jobs planned to completely tear down the house and rebuild a small villa.Woodside Town Council approved Jobs' application.Unexpectedly, the local cultural relic protectionists quit. They formed a cultural heritage protection group, and then took Jobs and the town council to court. A 2006 court ruling did not allow Jobs to demolish the heritage-worthy house.Jobs continued to appeal. In 2007, Jobs lost the case.At the time, Jobs had issued a statement through his lawyer saying: "I have made a sustained and costly effort to preserve the legacy." Three unnamed people were willing to relocate the entire house intact, but the relocation plan In the end it was not implemented.

Jobs once explained to the court that his main reason for wanting to tear down the house was that it was too big.This luxurious building has two long corridors, with bedrooms lined up on both sides of the corridors.Jobs said: "For our family of five, the house was too big and didn't feel like home. It was never a really interesting house. So, I wanted to tear it down and build a smaller but nicer house. Many more buildings." In March 2010, the twists and turns, the court overturned the judgment in January 2007, and Jobs was able to demolish the Woodside town house again.This time, without waiting for people from the cultural heritage protection organization to intervene, Jobs became the leader of the demolition team and began to direct the demolition project of the Jacklin Mansion. In February 2011, aerial photos taken by the plane showed that the location of the Jacklin mansion had been reduced to rubble.

In the matter of demolishing the house, Jobs' willfulness won again.Moreover, Jobs has submitted a detailed design plan for the new house to the town of Woodside.It is said that the budget of the new house is 8.45 million US dollars, and the area is only one-third of the original Jacklin mansion, about 450 square meters, with five bedrooms, a large terrace and a garage that can accommodate 3 cars .The house is surrounded by paths paved with gravel, and more than 20,000 square meters of flowers, plants and vegetables.Once completed, the four words "rural scenery" may be the most suitable adjective.

In recent years, the e-mail correspondence between Jobs and media reporters, ordinary users and even ordinary netizens has been repeatedly exposed by the media. The true nature of Joe's unruly and wise coexistence is fully revealed in these e-mails. When the iPad was first launched in Europe, people in Europe generally complained that the price of the iPad was more expensive than in the United States.Angry customers wrote letters to accuse Mr. Qiao.Unexpectedly, Master Qiao actually replied to these customers, and he personally used his unique "help subject" to shut up these whining customers. This is the content of Jobs' reply to a British customer: "Please, please study the laws of your country before sending the letter! According to the law, the price of the iPad in the UK must include value-added tax, which is about 18%. In the United States, the price There is no tax here." A German customer immediately discovered that even considering the value-added tax factor, the price of an iPad in Germany is significantly higher than that in other European countries, let alone the United States.As a result, the letter he wrote to Jobs also became a pretext for the helper to carry out legal education. Jobs wrote back and said: "Please, if you want to criticize, please criticize your own government! Germany just imposed a new copyright tax on computers not long ago." In the past two years, the war between Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones has been in full swing.Gang Leader Qiao actually used all available opportunities to satirize and ridicule the capabilities of Android phones.At one point, a customer who questioned Apple's censorship of iPhone apps and content wrote Jobs: "Apple is now increasingly subjective in determining what content consumers have access to. For example, the rejection of the Mark Fiore comics app, and strict regulations on X-rated content. I am certainly in favor of letting children Stay away from bad information, but sometimes I want to touch a little bit. I think this kind of application should be online, and parents can decide whether to block it. Apple is not a guardian. What Apple should do is design a very cool product and bring it to the consumer." Jobs replied: "The Fiori app is going to be in the app store soon, it's just a small mistake. From an ethical point of view, there will never be adult content in the app store. If someone really wants it, I will Advise him to get an Android phone." Just after the release of the iPhone 4, it encountered a "signal gate". When the user held the metal frame, the antenna of the mobile phone would be disturbed.One user emailed Jobs complaining: "I love my iPhone 4, it's really cool, but as soon as I hold the metal frame of the iPhone 4, the mobile signal disappears. Seems like this is still a common problem. How are you going to solve it?" "Just don't hold your phone in that position," Jobs wrote back. In May 2010, Ryan Tate, editor of the famous Silicon Valley gossip blog "Valleywag" (Valleywag), sent an email to Jobs, questioning that the iPad was not a revolutionary product.Unexpectedly, this e-mail broke a hornet's nest, and the distraught leader Qiao, like an angry youth who was despised by being flooded on the Internet, argued with Tate one after another in the e-mails, entangled endlessly. Tate: "If Dylan Thomas was 20 today, what would he think of your company? Would he think the iPad had nothing to do with the 'revolution'? Because the 'revolution' was about freedom." Jobs: "Yes, freedom from having some programs invade your privacy, freedom from having some programs waste your battery, freedom from being polluted by pornography. Yes, freedom. When these changes happen, the PC will The die-hards of the era will find that their old world is dying. That's it." Tate: "Wired is compelled to do a native app for the iPad, but why would they waste effort on porting? ... I've been assured that you will control content and app approval." Jobs: "My God, why are you demanding such technical details? This is not about freedom, but Apple wants to do the right thing for users. Users, programmers, publishers can do what they want, and if they don't want to, they You don’t have to buy an iPad, develop for an iPad, or distribute on an iPad. Looks like it’s not their problem, it’s your problem.” Tate: "You had the opportunity to set a new platform for phones and tablets, a platform for the future. But I'm disappointed to see you guys playing this game of centralization and revenge. I don't think it's a technical issue, it's It's you who impose your own morality about adult content, trade secrecy, technological purity." Jobs: "You're seriously misguided. ... For us, we're just doing the best we can, making and securing the user experience the way we do. You can argue, but our motives are pure. BTW , have you ever done anything great? Have you created something, or are you just criticizing other people's efforts and belittling their motivations?" Seriously, when I see Master Joe constantly sparring with each other in emails, or directly blocking the other party’s mouth with sarcasm and sarcasm, sometimes I really feel that Master Joe’s unrestrained and eclectic hippie demeanor is a lifetime Unchanging nature.No matter how mature Joe is, this true temperament will be unreservedly released in his speech and behavior. But who's to say it's not the best way to live? Zen said: "Everything is of its own nature, neither born nor destroyed. At all times, you can see yourself when you think about it, and there is no stagnation in all dharmas." Isn’t Qiao’s true disposition the only way for a person who has painstakingly practiced Zen to realize the Tao and pursued the Zen mind of Buddha nature to feel and prove himself in the ever-changing world?