Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine Page #13

My third story is about death.

About a year ago,

I was diagnosed with cancer.

I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,

and it clearly showed

a tumor on my pancreas.

I didn't even know

what a pancreas was.

The doctors told me

this was almost certainly

a type of cancer that is incurable,

and that I should expect to live

no longer than three to six months.

My doctor advised me to go home

and get my affairs in order,

which is doctor's code

for "prepare to die."

It means to try and tell your kids

everything you thought you'd have

the next ten years to tell them

in just a few months.

I lived with that diagnosis all day.

Later that evening, I had a biopsy.

I was sedated, but my wife,

who was there,

told me that when they viewed the cells

under a microscope,

the doctors started crying

because it turned out to be

a very rare form of pancreatic cancer

that is curable with surgery.

I had the surgery

and, thankfully, I'm fine now.

Steve Jobs talked about

his cancer very emotionally

at the Stanford graduation ceremony

in 2005.

And he very clearly told the story

to make it sound as though

he had been diagnosed

and moved immediately to surgery,

and been cured.

That simply wasn't true.

What I found out, over a period

of months of reporting,

was that Steve Jobs actually

had been diagnosed with cancer

nine months earlier, and that

for a period of nine months,

he had refused to have the surgery

that every medical expert said

was necessary to increase

his prospects for survival.

Instead of having the surgery,

he had sought

alternative medicine approaches

to try to cure himself of cancer.

Entrepreneurs have

an almost pathological need

to control their own fate.

They'll take any suffering

if they can just be in charge

of their destiny

and not have it

in somebody else's hands.

Apple's stock has been

volatile on rumors about Jobs's health.

The company's stock

was halted for a time,

then took a big hit when it re-opened

in after-hours trading.

Apple's share prices have dropped

with every pound

that Jobs has lost in recent months.

Apple really landed

into a dicey situation

when Steve decided

to issue a letter saying,

"Well, you know,

nothing's wrong with me."

"It's just a minor problem,"

And it wasn't a minor problem.

Steve Jobs made a point

of withholding from the world

that he faced this illness.

That's something

investors want to know,

because when you

bought Apple stock then,

you were buying into Steve Jobs.

He was obligated

to tell shareholders right away

about this serious illness.

You do personally

want to give Steve the privacy,

but Steve put the spotlight on him,

and you can't turn that off

just because it's inconvenient.

After the story came out,

I saw Steve.

He started talking about Apple,

and he said,

"You know, Apple is really a company

that doesn't have any divisions."

"We don't have all this bureaucracy."

And I said, "Steve, that would be

a great story for Fortune."

And he looked at me, and he said,

"No."

"I don't think we can do that story

with you. Not now."

"Not now."

And then he said,

and the whole room went quiet,

and he said, "you know, we used to..."

"We used to really be friends

with Fortune,

I used to be friends with Fortune,

but not anymore. Not anymore."

And then I remember these tears

came out of his eyes,

and one was on his glasses,

and then one, I remember it rolling

off his cheek and hitting his shirt,

and he was just crying,

and the whole room was silent.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs today

made his first public appearance

since getting a new liver

five months ago.

For the first time,

the 54-year-old CEO

publicly acknowledged

the liver transplant this spring

that saved his life.

Well, I now have the liver

of a mid-20s person.

I'd like to take a moment and thank

everybody in the Apple community

for the heartfelt support I got, too.

It really meant a lot.

And I'd also like

to especially thank Tim Cook

and the entire executive team of Apple.

They really rose to the occasion

and ran the company very ably

in that difficult period.

So, thank you, guys.

Let's give them a round of applause.

He loved what he did.

I do have an e-mail from him

saying that.

He said, you know,

"Both of us were fortunate," he said,

in that we loved what we did

and we were able to do it

for a long time.

And he said,

"What else could you ask for?"

We're maybe a little more experienced,

certainly more beat-up,

but the core values are the same.

I don't see why you have to change

if you get big.

Straightforward to me.

Apple was big.

By this time, one of the biggest

corporations in the world.

But each time we saw Jobs,

he seemed smaller.

As his devices got stronger,

Jobs got weaker.

It's so much more intimate

than a laptop,

and it's so much more capable

than a smartphone

with this gorgeous, large display.

I think that a lot of the grief

at Jobs's death

was a fear that we had been

very comfortable

for the last decade in his hands.

It's phenomenal to hold the internet

in your hand.

That he was going to keep

doing these amazing things.

Now he's gone, and there's no indication

that anyone's going to replace him.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

- It always helps...

- We love you!

Thank you.

It always helps,

and I appreciate it very much.

He resigned officially

in August. Two weeks earlier,

Apple had become the highest-valued

corporation on Earth.

And thank you for coming so much.

We've got a great week

planned for you.

This is a field

where one does not write a principia

which holds up for 200 years

or paints a painting that'll be

looked at for centuries,

or builds a church

that will be admired

and looked at in astonishment

for centuries.

No, this is a field

where one does one's work,

and in ten years, it's obsolete

and really will not be useable

within ten or 20 years.

I mean, you can't go back

and use an Apple I,

cos there's no software for it.

In another ten years or so,

you won't be able to use an Apple II.

You won't even be able to fire it up

and see what it was like.

It's sort of like

sediment of rocks.

You're building up a mountain,

and you get to contribute

your little layer of sedimentary rock

to make the mountain that much higher.

But no one on the surface will,

unless they have x-ray vision,

will see your sediment.

In Japan, there's

an idea called "mono no aware,"

meaning "the deep awareness of things".

It celebrates the melancholy

of the passing of life

and sees more beauty in the fallen leaf

than the one on the branch.

Maybe that's what Japan held for Jobs.

The sadness of the soul

as expressed in the beauty of things.

In the end, I was left

with the same question

with which I began this journey.

"Why did so many strangers weep

for Steve Jobs?"

It's too simple to say it was

because he gave us products we love

without asking why we love them

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