hum

The thing I found difficult was the noise. I’m a bit deaf but it is so loud that you can feel it in your guts. I can’t help feeling that there are going to be a lot of deaf people living here in 20 years time.

Man must always bear in mind that God is omnipresent and is always with him; that God is the most subtle matter everywhere diffused … Let man realize that when he is looking at material things he is in reality gazing at the image of the Deity which is present in all things. With this in mind man will always serve God even in small matters.

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.

My mom used to say it to me, and my wife says it now. There’s even a slogan that says it! “Approach all situations with a joyful mind.”

It also brought me and Dad back together. Our relationship had virtually broken down when I first became ill. His best friend Bert was my doctor, and Bert had thought I was making it all up. Dad was caught between loyalties – me or Bert. And for a long time it looked as if he had chosen Bert. Eventually, he came back to me, but we needed to do a lot of bridge building. And this was where the Floyd came in.

It was summer 1974, and he would take afternoons off work (a massive sacrifice for him because he was a workaholic) and come into my bedroom and listen to the Floyd with me. There were two beds in my room. I lay on mine, he lay on the other, and we shut our eyes and concentrated.

My most significant discovery so far in my life was the result of one single decision, my decision to join Apple […] the best decision that I ever made […] I listened to my intuition, not the left side of my brain […]
I am where I am in life because my parents sacrificed more than they should have, because of teachers, professors, friends and mentors who cared more than they had to, and because of Steve Jobs and Apple.

I was still DJing, but what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet.

“How would you explain it, Pooh?”
“With a song,” he said. “A little something I just made up.”
“Go ahead.”
“Certainly … (cough).”

How can you get very far,
If you don’t know Who You Are?
How can you do what you ought,
If you don’t know What You’ve Got?
And if you don’t know Which To Do
Of all the things in front of you,
Then what you’ll have when you are through
Is just a mess without a clue
Of all the best that can come true
If you know What and Which and Who.

“That’s it,” he said, leaning back and closing his eyes.
“A Masterpiece.”
“Well, better than average, maybe.”

Sooner or later, we are bound to discover some things about ourselves that we don’t like. But once we see they’re there, we can decide what we want to do with them. Do we want to get rid of them completely, change them into other things, or use them in beneficial ways? The last two approaches are often especially Useful, since they avoid head-on conflict, and therefore minimize struggle. Also, they allow those transformed characteristics to be added to the list of things we have that help us out.

In a similar manner, instead of struggling to erase what are referred to as negative emotions, we can learn to use them in positive ways. We could describe the principle like this: while pounding on the piano keys may produce noise, removing them doesn’t exactly further the creation of music. The principles of Music and Living aren’t all that different, we think.

“Wouldn’t you say, Pooh?”
“Say what?” asked Pooh, opening his eyes.
“Music and Living —”
“The same thing,” said Pooh.

The Tao of Pooh