In this time of mourning over the passing of Steve Jobs it is important to understand what made him such and outstanding individual. And although it is an inconvenient truth to some people, his success was due to using LSD. That is what Apple’s trademark phrase “Think Differently” is referring to.
In his own words, Jobs said that taking LSD was “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” This is what Steve Jobs himself believed was his advantage over Microsoft Windows, saying of Bill Gates, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
Although it is generally good to teach our children to “say no to drugs” not all drugs are the same. Kids should definitely say no to drugs like cigarettes, excessive alcohol, cocaine, and methamphetamine. But when it come to the psychedelic drugs like marijuana, mescalin, and LSD one has to appreciate that when used properly these drugs can have a profound and permanent positive effect transforming the individual in a way that allows someone to “Think Differently” and be the forefront of computer development like Steve Jobs was.
So when you sit down in front of your Mac computer, your iPod, iPad, iPhone, and listen to you music on iTunes, think of Steve Jobs and wonder where the world would be today if not for the people who “Think Differently” that create all this wonderful technology we enjoy.
Was LSD used in the creation of the new layout?
Har!
What a crock of shit. Where are the millions and millions of Steve Jobs clones from the 60s and 70s?
One guy’s experience does not prove the rule.
Mac Guy ; Dude – if you’ve got it you get it.
You might be right, but think about the implications of your retort. If there are millions of Steve Jobs out there, by definition they cannot all be in the tech field. Thinking differently presupposes one is part of a thinking minority. If there is no common way of thinking, how can there be an exception to it?
So you might know about Steve Jobs because of Apple’s marketing and public relations. What about a teacher thinking differently? You might not ever hear about them because they do not have a marketing or public relations department to promote their achievements. And, their “customers” (students) might not appreciate the teachers achievements in the same way they appreciate their iPod. But that teacher’s influence might be much farther reaching in impact to the world than the iPod.
So your question just might represent your own ignorance of the other millions* of Steve Jobs out there in other fields.
*No one actually knows how many people took LSD in the 60’s and 70’s.
In my article I point out that it was Steve Jobs himself, not just my opinion, that LSD was the important key to his success. If you don’t believe it then you aren’t believing Jobs opinion about his own life.
Is there a link I missed, or are we really calling four paragraphs an article now?
From personal experience, LSD can change a person, for better or worse depending on the experience.
The trademark phrase was actually Think Different and not Think Differently.
It’d be nice to think he went out on one final glorious trip
Was LSD used in the creation of the new layout?
Yeah, the brown acid. Man.
This is just silly.
Last year I bartered for a small pile of pot…it’s amazing where your brain goes, and how fast it goes, on THC. I ended up carrying around paper and a pen to write down all the great stuff that went through my head. Amazing, really it was.
Maybe so, but he must have been shit-faced drunk when he dreamed up iTunes.
LSD is alien technology. Watch Transformers two. One sliver of that cube and that kid was recalling all memories from human dna evolution. LSD was first synthesized when the chemist was trying to synthesize the active ingredients in psilocybin mushrooms which according to dennis McKenna have traveled for eons across the galaxy to land on earth.
I think you should check again, I believe he was synthesizing the active chemical in ergot fungus.
I used LSD several times, and can verify it is something you never forget. I don’t think it makes you more creative in the long term, however. It showed me that visions of weird patterns of colorful design playing themselves endlessly on ordinary, unextraordinary surfaces are reintrepretations of photons striking the retina, and are re-organized by your scrambled brain.
Consider Feyneman’s observation: Light is traveling all about in all directions, and your retina only picks up a tiny bit of it. Then, your brain manages to make sense of it and keep the images orderly and intrepretable even when the objects are moving, and your retina is shifting, causing the images of the object to constantly impact different rods and cones, and travel to your visual cortex. The photons from that horse’s ass are never impacting the same spots, and your visual cortex has to re evaluate the object and make sense of it constantly.
This is all so much more intense and remarkable than any iPod’s processor.
The brain in it’s natural state is more amazing than the brain in an unordered state.
But some people are fooled, and think there is some kind of instant genius awarded to those who ingest chemicals that disturb the cortex.
All the personalities in the “Think Different” campaign were DEAD and not thinking at all anymore ! But I can’t agree that psycho-active drugs are necessary to “Think Different” – it has been called “thinking outside the box” and just means start with a clean sheet and ask yourself how you would do something if every aspect was up to you, without reference to what had gone on before … Any Jobs developed into very marketable products ideas that other had, for example the Xerox Star with its GUI, laser printing, the MP3 Player, etc… His “genius” was to see that he had to offer a complete system, pretty much as Edison had to set up electric power companies to sell lightbulbs !!! Another aspect of Jobs perception of markets was to “Keep it simple, stupid!” or KISS – the principle that you would reach the broadest market with easy to use device … The iPad being the realization of the DynaBook of Alan Kay way back in 1972, when the Technology just wasn’t there …
You hit it just right.
This is Alan Kay’s Dynabook, but without the limitations of a keyboard and with GPS, attitude control, accelerometers WIFI and 3G.
If only it came with Squeak! built in…
Speaking of bad acid trips, the Westboro Baptist Church is planning to protest Steve Job’s funeral if they can.
I look forward to watching all the Youtube videos of outraged Apple Fanboys literally tearing those bungholes apart into bloody chunks for their “Blasphemy” against Steve Jobs.
http://pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394283,00.asp
If those fucktards protest, I suggest they’ll see a flash mob like the the world has never seen before.
And, the blog still can’t deal with www. lol
If they are stupid to try to usurp this, they will be very disappointed.
I don’t think that the Apple fanboys will tear them limb from limb.
Instead They will engage in conversation with them about a million topics that are way beyond the capacity of any member of the Westboro Baptist church until the Westboro church members realize that the only way to make a dent in the Cult Of Mac is with a tire iron. 🙂
The arcana about how many angel can dance on the head of a pin will seem gross and obtuse when compared with the level of Apple design minutia which can be recited by the Apple faithful. 🙂
The Westboro Baptist church might as well go to an animé convention or a trekkie convention.
Westboro meet Otaku and Trekkies.
May the Flying Spaghetti Monster have mercy on your wretched souls.
(expect violence…)
In the article 😉 the cops say BTDT, they give WBC protection and a place to protest.
The sad part is that some jerkoff journos will cover their protest, which is probably being held many blocks away on the remains of an old torn-down gas station.
While I agree that LSD is an experience that one will never forget, it it not necessarily good. As a child in the 1960s, when my mother was in charge of the first aid booth at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, I witnessed a few outrageously bad trips.
As a college freshman in 1980, I did it twice. Glad to have had the experience, but nothing I would want to do regularly, or since.
But, I agree with Jobs that Bill Gates could use a dose or two. Some Ex-Lax might help too!
I figure he started to hallucinate Apple gadgets with
rounded corners.
People try to dignify their drug habits, it makes them easier to live with.
If the DEA caught wind of this. They would have locked Steve Jobs up as a trouble maker.
oops– I’ll try this:
http://3qqq.us/1/stevejobs.jpg
The only people that advocate the recreational use of drugs are other addicts.
They just cannot face life without them. A chemical form of cowardice.
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What a load of bollocks.
Then have the drug users stop.
Totally. No drugs forever.
That won’t happen because they will first whine why should they and then if puched they cannot because they have become enslaved to the drug.
Lack of control and cowardice. The real world is too real for them.
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Or maybe the whole thing about Steve Jobs being one of the most successful people in recent history has been falsified to promote the drug addicts agenda? For most people who use LSD, weed, alcohol etc. it’s for non-productive purposes. But for intelligent people like Steve Jobs and Carl Segan, LSD was very useful.
You don’t know everything, and people have the right to choose what they do with themselves, so long as it doesn’t hurt themselves or others. So deal with it! Your little bubble of naivety isn’t perfect, and neither is mine, but you are wrong, and I’m not right.
2/10 troll. Try again.
actually, you all need an education. LSD WAS used by a number of engineers and scientists as a means to look at, to them at the time, fairly insoluble problems in their fields. Whether or not they received any special insight or not has not been published to my knowledge. Their have been a number of “evangelists” of the LSD experience that felt that the experience did indeed benefit them, much as a religious experience has done for others, and have “spread the faith”, not as a recreational drug, Cursor, but as a means to get it touch with some other aspect of humanity, whatever that may be. It is also well known that LSD, more than any other form of therapy or drug, had helped, under the control of a psychiatrist, with alcoholism. It has also been useful for depression in some individuals. Having experienced LSD on several occasions, I cannot say that I received any special insights, but I was looking more for enlightenment than problem solving. Seeing the responses to so many of the topics here, I can say with assurance that numerous individuals that post here need to take LSD to kill that bug up their asses…
So did the CIA great track record. I’d rather have a good blowjob.
“Alcoholism” was a term dreamed up to make it sound like people have a disease and not a mental illness related to compulsive behaviour.
Before then it was called Dipsomania.
Before then it was called being a drunk.
But like all addicts, they don’t like to be called names that remind them they are doing something aberrant.
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Dude, wtf? My first response to your BS was pretty polite, but not this time: you can just shut the hell up! I am not a drug addict, I am not an alcoholic, I am an occasional user of both alcohol, and weed, AND SO F***ING WHAT? Get over your self-righteous BS you ass.
You may feel better about yourself inventing ways that you are just ever so much better than other people, and that’s fine, just keep it to yourself.
getintouch,
I was aware of that too. When Timothy Leary invented LSD, he thought he was inventing a psychotropic that would help people. I think he believed that to the end.
I know of one person who was deeply hurt by LSD. She took it ONCE at a concert which caused her to have frequent short hallucinations ever sense. This prevented her from driving a car and all kinds of jobs. That was years ago. I don’t I know how she is now.
>Whether or not they received any special insight or not has not been published to my knowledge.
You didn’t read this part?
>In his own words, Jobs said that taking LSD was “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” This is what Steve Jobs himself believed was his advantage over Microsoft Windows, saying of Bill Gates, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
Taking LSD could be a life altering experience. Some people thought it made them better. A few had flash backs they loathed so much they killed themselves.
You role the dice and take what the fates hand out.
This is the same old argument that has been reenacted over and over again.
Xyz (you fill in the name) used to take drugs, therefore drugs helped him to do the things that he did.
The same thing has been said for Bob Marley and countless others.
So what:s the message? take drugs and you can accomplish great things?
It takes an insane amount of concentration, dedication, work, thinking and sleepless nights to put together the great things that they did.
To imply that they did it by taking drugs is pure nonsense.
The reality is: They were able to achieve great things *despite* the fact that they were taking drugs.
Please.
@peppeddu this is a perfect example of an outside observers view of something that you have 0 idea about. For anyone that has let themselves actually get away and “trip” they understand you are talking out of your ass. Citing one person as bob marley , you obviously don’t know the powers of psychedelics as you view it as one of those illegal drugs. I call LSD more of an experience than a drug. Once again only the few that have dropped out can understand why Steve jobs experience opened his mind to creating all that we know he did. Let a credible source correct your nonsense.
It takes an insane amount of concentration, dedication, work, thinking and sleepless nights to put together the great things that they did.
Insanity or realization of it was directly from LSD. Concentration and dedication was helped by the LSD experience .. Work, thinking and
sleepless nights are not just for entrepreneurs so that point is invalid.
To imply that they did it by taking drugs is pure nonsense.
This is where you have no place to try to inform readers of this post…
To imply someone being successful from heroin and crack is nonsense.. But realizing the magnitude of LSD and it’s effects on the mind would and will help the user if they use it right. He obviously had the capacity to handle the trip but not only handled it he used it to jumpstart his career.
The reality is that they were able to achieve great things *With help* from the Fact they used LSD. Go be your own man experience religion for yourself and stop following the herd that thinks all drugs are bad and equal.
The reality is: They were able to achieve great things *despite* the fact that they were taking drugs.
I have done it twice, once a very weak dose, then once again, which was the real deal. it changed my life, permanently. All in all, in small positive ways. People that have done it totally get it, those who don’t, won’t. I hink eventually, it will be proven that for whatever reason, it establishes new pathways in your brain. I experienced synesthesia, intensity changes in color, hyper sensitive hearing, visions, the whole ball of wax. I think that the set and setting are crucial. If you are in a bad state of mind with people or in an area you do not trust, it will be a bad experience. I was in Harbin Resort in NoCal, and it was a seminal life experience.
It’s “Think Different”…and that makes all the difference.
I don’t by this bull and find this post a show of disrespect to the great progressive, gay loving, forward thinking liberal that is Steve Jobs.
Not surprising that conservatives fry their brain cells with acid in the hopes of being rational when in fact it makes them more hateful, irrational, frightened little sheep.
Congratulations on having the most hateful and irrational comment on this article today! Yay for you!!!!
As extra credit, it also gets an award for it being nearly identical to every other regurgitated sheepish comment you post here!
Dallas,
Your “gay loving” phrase bugs me. One needn’t love gays in order to believe they deserve equal rights. It’s called being a good American.
I am outspoken about gay rights myself and get accused of loving or even being gay. I don’t really care but this totally misses the point. Good Americans believe in equal rights for all Americans — love ’em or not.
Just what exactly did the LSD do for Jobs? Did it convince him that everything he was did was Insanely Great(tm) and Magical(tm)? Or was he that much of an egomaniac before he left for asia?
Some time in the future there will hopefully be a renewed appreciation for LSD and the fact that it is really like no other drug. It has amazing potential.
It is a great pity that the establishment came down so heavily on it.
Drugs, outside of the use as medicine, should always be “come down” upon.
They are not toys for your entertainment.
They trigger natural endorphins that your body depends on for survival, Over stimulated the areas of the brain that trigger and release them do not function right when you need them.
So you are not only fucked up, you are fucking yourself later on down the road.
Give a monkey a brain…
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Spare us your flawed judgements, and please don’t talk about things you know nothing about. Natural endorphins bwahah.
Blaming a symptom instead of the cause.
Hey Cursor_? Pull your head in.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, clearly – but you make a lot of noise.
I agree.