For Steve Jobs, maybe life is like an "on-off" switch. "Click! And you're gone.

Walter Isaacson in his massive bio, "Steve Jobs" tells the story of Jobs attending a Lutheran church with his parents. All this came to an end in 1968 when LIFE Magazine published a shocking cover story on a couple of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took the magazine to Sunday School and confronted the church's pastor. "If I raise my finger, will God know which one I'm going to raise even before I do it?"

The Pastor answered, "Yes, God knows everything."
Jobs then pulled out the LIFE cover and asked, "Well does God know about this and what's going to happen to these children?"

Jobs announced that he didn't want to have anything to do worshiping such a God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism.

Years later, in reflection, he said, "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it." I would agree. But it's sad that He just shut the door to Christianity based on a presumption that God wasn't doing anything to alleviate suffering in the world. My question to Steve Jobs would've been, "If you are NOW so enlightened, what are you doing to relieve human suffering like that in Biafra?"

When Jobs learned that he had pancreatic cancer, one of his first calls was to Larry Brilliant, whom he had first met at an ashram in India. "Do you still believe in God?" Jobs asked him. Brilliant said that he did, and they discussed the many paths to God that they had been taught by the Hindu Guru Neem Karoli Baba. Then Brilliant asked Jobs  what was wrong. "I have cancer." Jobs replied.

One sunny afternoon when he wasn't feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. "I'm about fifty-five on believing in God," he said. "For most of my life, I've felt there must be more to our existence than meets the eye."

He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. "I'd like to think that something survives after you die," he said. "It's strange to think that you can accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures."

He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're gone."

Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices."

From what we know of Steve's last days, he never had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. In fact, I believe that's why there was so much uncertainty and contemplation on life after death. Even Steve Jobs found it hard to accept the fact that you just flick an "off" switch and this whole thing is over. Nothing survives except maybe your company and some really cool products.

Steve Jobs' legacy is AMAZING!! It includes the following:

• The Apple II, the first personal computer
• The Macintosh, which begat the home computer revolution
• PIXAR, which gave us "Toy Story" and ramped up the miracle of digital imagination in cartoons.
• Apple stores which reinvented the role of a store in defining a brand.
• The iPod which changed the way we consume music.
• The iTunes store, which saved the music industry.
• The iPhone, which turned mobile phones into music, photography, video, email & web devices.
• The App store, which spawned a new content creation industry.
• The iPad, which launched tablet computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines, books & videos.
• iCloud, which demoted the computer from its control role in managing our content and let all our devices sync seamlessly.

Apple has surpassed Microsoft and everyone else as the most valuable company in the world. Steve Jobs accomplished a lot in his brief time here on earth.

But, having said that, I am reminded of the words of Jesus recorded in Mark 8:36, "And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything (even creating the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, Pixar, even Apple itself) worth more than your soul?"

Steve Jobs: Great visionary, inventor, marketing genius--why was he so mean?

One of Steve Jobs' great strengths was knowing how to focus. "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do." Now there's some wisdom for all of us. At various times in my life and church, things have been so out-of-focus, and partly because either I or the church were doing too many things. At Apple, Jobs whittled everything down to just 2 or 3 innovative products being worked on at any one time.

Jobs also espoused the "team concept" and intentionally designed the Apple buildings and offices so that workers had to go some distance to the bathroom, walking across the atrium where there was coffee and lots of little areas to sit and chat. He wanted to force people out of their comfort zones so they had to "bump into" one another and possibly get inspired or energized by these purposely-designed encounters.

The greatest weakness of Steve Jobs' was how he treated and abused people, even in his own family. Jobs saw the world in binary terms. A person was either a HERO, or a BOZO. A product was either amazing or a piece of (fill in the blank). Products, ideas, even food was something that was either "the best thing ever," or it was crap, brain-dead, inedible. As a result, any perceived flaw could set off a rant. The finish on a piece of metal, the curve on the head of a screw, the shade of blue on a box--he would declare they they "completely suck" until that moment when he suddenly pronounced them "absolutely perfect."

Unfortunately, Steve's Zen Buddhism never produced in him a zen-like calm and inner serenity. He was tightly coiled, impatient, and made no effort to hide these flaws. The author, Walter Isaacson, writes, "Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. "My job is to say when something sucks, rather than sugarcoat it," he said.

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the early Apple scientists who designed the Mac operating system, said, "The one question I'd truly love Steve to answer is, 'Why are you sometimes so mean?'" Even his family members wondered whether he simply lacked the filter that restrains people from venting their wounding thoughts or willfully bypassed it.

When finally asked this question, Jobs would simply claim, "This is who I am, and you cannot expect me to be someone I'm not."

The nasty edge to his personality was not necessary and it hindered him more than it helped him. He actually felt that berating and verbally attacking Apple team members would separate the A-team from the B-team and only leave him with the cream of the crop after all the weak ones who couldn't take it had dropped out, quit and gone to work elsewhere. He was left with some amazing talent who stuck it out, persevered and developed some revolutionary products, but he also drove away a boatload of talented folks who found a healthier work environment elsewhere.

Every now and then, a wise colleague would pull Jobs aside to try to get him to settle down. Lee Clow was a master at doing this. "Steve, can I talk to you?" He would quietly say after Jobs had belittled someone publicly. He would go into Jobs' office and explain how hard everyone was working. "When you humiliate them, it's more debilitating than stimulating," he said in one such session. Jobs would apologize and say he understood. But then he would lapse again. "It's simply who I am," he would say.

Steve Jobs was wrong. He didn't have to be the way he was. It was a choice that he continued to make day after day. His quest at Zen Buddhism and inner peace was elusive and had no impact on changing his life. In my next and final post, we'll look at how Steve Jobs approached his mortality once he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Did he feel secure in his beliefs or was he troubled about possibly not knowing God?