What We Have in Common with the World's Smartest Person
October 6th, 2021 by admin
One of the smartest people in the world in our lifetime was Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple. He was a brilliant and driven leader who had the innate ability to see around life’s corner and see matters before others saw them, and who seemingly had the ability to bend life itself.
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a serious form of cancer in his early 50’s, and he had a successful surgery at one of the premier medical centers in the world. His world-class doctors told him he would need another surgery, too. If he got that second surgery, he had a very good chance to beat the serious form of cancer he had.
Steve Jobs did not listen to his world-class doctors, however. Growing up in California in the 1960’s, he was a bit of a free-thinker (the parents of most of us reading this would say “hippie.”) He said he “didn’t want my body to be opened---I didn’t want to be violated in that way,” even though he had an initial successful surgery.
Steve Jobs chose a different path. He insisted on trying alternative therapies for nine crucial months. To cure cancer, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and other treatments he found on the Internet. He even consulted a doctor he found on the Internet who recommended other unproven approaches. Although many people were telling him:” Don’t try and treat it with those roots and vegetables and these kinds of things….”
By the time the Stanford University Medical School team operated on him nine months later, however, the tumor had spread to tissues around the pancreas.
He died a short time later, in October 2011.
Ramzi Amri, a Fulbright scholar researching at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the tumors Jobs is believed to have contracted were “relatively mild” and very survivable if detected early. But since Jobs delayed surgery for at least nine months, it was “sound to assume that choice for alternative medicine …eventually led to an unnecessarily early death.”
Steve Jobs sought out the widely acclaimed author, Walter Isaacson, to write his biography and to amplify to the world that he wasted time on these alternative medicines and choices. If he had listened to the experienced medical doctors, he had a very good chance of beating his cancer.
How could such a brilliant leader, with one of life’s most significant combinations of intelligence, work ethic, drive, and discernment of key facts, make such a profoundly wrong decision? Why would he openly reject proven doctors and scientists and take such an unproven course of treatment and lose valuable time which, in time, took his life?
You and I know the answer, though, don’t we? The answer to the why of it all is our deeply ingrained greatest barrier, too: ego.
Steve Jobs was done in by his own ego. He thought he knew more than anyone else. And because he was so highly successful and with few if any intellectual peers, really, no one—no one seriously challenged him on what was, as he came to see, a bizarre view of things.
You do not have to be an innovative and highly successful entrepreneur to think you know more than you do. Egos have a way of overtaking any one of us.
The Roman Catholic Church for centuries made use of a “devil’s advocate” in canonization (who will be named a saint) decisions. The devil’s advocate had a noble name himself—promoter of the faith-promotor fidei. His job was to build a cause against sainthood.
That position was eliminated in 1983, and without a promoter of the faith, saints have been chosen at a rate nearly 20 times faster than at any time in the last several hundred years. Without an intelligent challenge to key facts and events, the path to sainthood was, and is, often without serious challenge.
If you do not have a person or process who will challenge factually and authentically your assumptions, you are at risk, no matter who you are and what the decision is to be made before you.
What Steve Jobs needed was a robust “truth to power” promoter of the faith. It likely would have saved his life.
Several decades ago, the world was on the hunt for cracking the DNA code. The world’s greatest scientists were chasing the key in a collaborative fashion. Except for one: the most brilliant of them all. She thought she knew more than anyone.
But as it turned out, the collaborators prevailed. Why? They could see the gaps in thinking of the other scientists. Which in time worked to their benefit. They helped to corroborate the importance of rigorous questioning of factual and theoretical assumptions.
If you do not have the benefit of a seasoned and thoughtful alternative point of view, you have a longer road to get to get to sound decisions, no matter what your lane of decision-making may be.
Steve Jobs had another challenge, too. In addition to ignoring the most brilliant and recognized doctors in the world, he got some of his treatment from another source: the Internet.
There are any number of items you can find on the Internet which will advise you to take some of the, shall we say kindly, less helpful paths in your life. Most anyone who has ten working fingers and thumbs can get on the Internet and tell you some of the most bizarre and demonstrably false facts about the most important factors in our life. Including your health care, and “real” remedies to serious health issues.If you think you are not susceptible to its wily charms, look at some of the most intelligent, decent, and religious people you know who have been sucked into the vortex of bizarre and even illegal actions by roaming the Internet. And if you think there are some peppy non-prescription pills which Amazon can send to you and avoid all the advice of real doctors with real facts and statistically valid data, you have lost the tether to common sense and the skill set that made you successful.
What I have learned about life on the way to the courthouse is this: A strong ego is a profoundly important piece of the puzzle of what drives any of us, no matter what we do for a living, to a highly successful life. But you better have a counterweight to what you think you know which you may not know so well, or, at all.
Whether you are the world’s smartest person or not, our ego, unchecked, can speed us by the real facts and the real path to a viable solution. If the world’s smartest person can get sucked down that rabbit hole of thinking he knew more than he really did, so can we.
The other challenge which has become an even more serious to all of us is the growing power of the Internet. For all its benefits, it is largely unbridled, too. Senator Patrick Moynihan, and before him, James R. Schlesinger, in pre-Internet times, said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.”
But not anymore. We are entitled to our own facts, and you can find them on the Internet in the disguise of truth. There are regularly little or no journalistic and scientific disciplines on what is said for the truth. There are no signs about when you are about to jump into the deepest part of the pool; no depth markers which warn you are way beyond real facts and into the deep waters of often categorially and bizarrely untrue statements. Disguised as medically and intellectually sound information, of course, but unsound all the same.
One must wonder if Steve Jobs had recovered and lived longer, would he have helped us focus on some of the need for appropriate (legal) limits of this world-changing technology? Because the Internet has the unique capacity not only to lead us but profoundly mislead us, too.
If we are all entitled to our own facts, we have a lot more at risk than we may realize. As the world’s smartest person came to understand at the end of his life when it was too late.
Mike Wells
Posted in: On the Way to the Courthouse