Dongwu Alumni Association: Steve Jobs’ “Apple Zen”

Dong: Why did Buffett start buying Apple stocks recently? Because it has met Buffett's requirements, it has become a mass consumer product.

Wu: It’s called “commodityization”. What is commodityization? That is to say, it becomes a daily and stable consumption. Commodityization, I have another definition for it, called "grocery storeization", which is something you can buy in a grocery store. This is basically what Buffett does.

Winter: See's Candies, Coca-Cola, Gillette Blades...all of them.

Wu: There is actually one thing about Buffett’s investment philosophy that we Chinese people have overlooked, that is, he is connected with insurance companies. The insurance company finally cashes in on you many years later. He wants to ensure that his income can still pay for your original purchase decades later. Therefore, it is impossible for him to buy a high-tech, brilliant but very short-lived product. It’s a technological product that will soon wither. No matter how popular it is, don’t buy it.

Dong: But as a user like this, frankly speaking, this is very contradictory. I will buy Buffett's stocks, but I don't agree with the products Buffett buys.

Wu: That is to say, a person's consumption and investment are often opposite. When real estate changes from an investment product to a consumer product, its nature changes. I'm afraid that if you apply the same concept of buying consumer goods to buying investment products, then you will be in trouble.

Dong: This reminds me of Apple products during the Steve Jobs era. So, I began to trace back many of Steve Jobs’ spiritual ideas. I saw an article online about a Japanese Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki and his influence on Steve Jobs.

Wu: There were two Suzukis that had a great influence on Steve Jobs. A Suzuki actually has nothing to do with him, it's just a kind of spiritual connection. Of course, this person is not targeting Steve Jobs, he is targeting the entire Western world. There is a man named Suzuki Dazuo, he is a Japanese. He wrote 67 books introducing Zen Buddhism in English, so much so that Westerners thought Zen Buddhism was Japanese. Because of their preconceptions, including the word "Zen" in English, which comes from Japanese, they have no idea that Zen came from China. There is also Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, who was Steve Jobs’ personal spiritual mentor and had a decisive influence on Steve Jobs. I even thought of a word - cultural transgene, which means that as an American, his soul is an Eastern soul.

Dong: Although Zen Buddhism is said to be Chinese, it is true that many Japanese craftsmanship spirits, including the spirit of concentration, were passed on to Steve Jobs through a certain Zen method passed down from Japan, and are reflected in His product design ideas and concepts.

Wu: He asked Apple to complete a "cultural genetic modification." Apple is a Japanese company from its product philosophy, including its product strategy. There is another company that was originally a Japanese company, but it eventually became an American company, which is Sony.

Winter: Shunryu Suzuki had 12 principles. Looking back now, they really influenced Steve Jobs’s life and his product philosophy. We can share it with you today. This is also a good guideline for many friends today when dealing with your daily life. Number 1 is to focus on one thing at a time.

Wu: What is Zen? It's very simple. Eating means eating, sleeping means sleeping. Eat when you are hungry and sleep when you are tired. People who do not learn Zen think about sleeping when eating, and thinking about eating when sleeping.

There is a book that Steve Jobs loved to read, called "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." There is a famous sentence in this book called "Hurry itself is the most undesirable attitude. When you do something and want to be quick, it means that you no longer care about it and want to do something else." . ”

Winter: Two weeks ago, I interviewed a person in Kyoto. This person’s name is Kubota Jing. He started studying brain science more than 60 years ago. Later, when he was in his 60s, he started to develop his research results into an education school. I asked him, what is the core method of your children's education? He said, for example, when we change the baby's diaper, you have to tell him that I am changing the diaper for you; when we feed him food, we say that we are eating bananas and drinking milk now. Regardless of whether he understands it or not, you must tell him. He said it was a brain development thing, but I felt there was a message behind it. When you are doing something, you can be aware that you are doing it. And this matter, he said, has begun to form in the brain before children learn language. Later, many of us who meditate spend our whole lives doing nothing more than returning to this matter and knowing what we are doing and what we are doing.

Dong: Article 2 is actually an extension of Article 1, which is to do things slowly and carefully. You may complete a task one at a time, but you may also rush through it. Remember to watch your actions carefully and not be too hasty and haphazard. This actually takes practice, and it helps you focus.

Wu: There is a man named Thich Nhat Hanh. He was originally a Vietnamese and later lived in France. He said that we modern people can’t even eat oranges.

The real way to eat an orange is to hold the orange in your hand and peel it open slowly. When you peel off the skin, there will be a kind of juice in the skin that will spurt out. When this juice spurts out, there will be a smell. Come. You slowly open the orange peel, take out a piece of orange, slowly put it in your mouth, feel the cold and sweet feeling, then bite it, feel the taste again, etc. . This is called eating oranges. This state has a particularly big benefit. It is a very important way to dispel anxiety.

Dong: Even when I heard you say this, I blinked my eyes several times, and I already felt the irritating feeling after the orange juice sprayed into my eyes. This may also be a very unique characteristic of human beings. When it does not happen, we can completely hear a sentence through our imagination.

Wu: Human beings have a problem, especially modern people. They like to feel something seriously when it is not in front of them. Hemingway once said that I can only write about Paris if I leave Paris.

Winter: The third piece of advice Shunryu Suzuki gave to Steve Jobs was to complete it completely. He said that many people do things halfway because there are many things waiting for us to do now, so they rush to the next thing before finishing it. In fact, you should complete it completely before starting again.

Wu: There is a word that we still mention from time to time, but we may have forgotten its original meaning. It is called "The Duke of Zhou spits out food, and the world returns to its heart." This is a sentence in Cao Cao's "Dan Ge Xing" poetry. One day when Duke Zhou was eating, he happened to pick up a piece of meat and put it in his mouth. He said that a guest was coming. Duke Zhou immediately spit out the meat and hurried to receive the guest. This time could not be delayed even 0.1 seconds. From here you can see Duke Zhou's attitude towards his guests. Only with such people, everyone will eventually obey you and be inspired by you.

Dong: This "ritual" thing, after it becomes a behavioral habit, it will react on your mental model. If we usually put everything out of sight, such as giving things away, then because we have formed this mental model, many things have a beginning and an end.

Wu: When you really "recognize the truth of the moment" and you do something seriously, you find that this thing is far from boring as you thought.

Dong: In fact, it is very beautiful and important to complete one thing and have it come to an end. It also feels very satisfying.

Dong: The fourth piece of advice he gave Steve Jobs was to do less. He said that if you do it less, you can do it more focused, slowly, and more thoroughly. If you fill your day with different tasks, you will rush from one thing to the next without stopping to think about what you are going to do. This is actually a suggestion advanced step by step from the previous ones.

Wu: Suzuki Junlong told him that it is the way to do things and be a person, but it is also the way to make products. I just said that Apple is a Japanese company and Sony is an American company. Sony has more than 2,200 SQs. You can calculate Apple's SQ. In essence, there is only one, and the others are just a matter of adding a little or less. The iTouch just removes the communication module, and the iPad just makes the screen a little bigger. Sony has done a lot of things. Sony is basically hopeless now, but it can still live for a long time because as a model company in Japan, Japan will not let it die. It was originally a Japanese company, but in the end it became infected with the mentality of American companies, which is the mentality of an octopus. It wants to do everything and want to get involved in everything. Apple is powerful, but it does very little. Apple was originally one color - white, and later it was at most black. Black and white are originally the same color. If you produce so many colorful products, it proves that your genes are beginning to become disordered. Originally, with the help of Shunryu Suzuki, Jobs completed a cultural transformation and transformed an American company into a Japanese company. As a result, in Cook's hands, that genetic trait gradually began to weaken, and it gradually became an increasingly ordinary company.

Dong: As a consumer, we feel the kind of company that no longer makes you feel spiritually connected to it. In the past, you would feel that you were highly identified with it spiritually. When you buy it, you don’t just buy the product, you buy its functions, you buy its entire value. You have paid for its values, its aesthetics and its moderation, but you are not willing to pay for those things now because they are gone.

Winter: One more thing, leave some white space between things. Don't overdo things. In fact, this also means that you don’t have to say all the words, don’t say a long sentence between words, and leave half a sentence in the middle.

Wu: Leaving blank space is a very advanced and threshold thing. Leaving a blank space does not mean that you are incapable of doing things. It is because when your ability to do things is strong enough, you can leave a meaningful blank space. In this gap, the French composer Debussy said that music is nothing more than using strings of notes to create some meaningful rests.

What others hear may be music, but people who really understand music often hear the blank space between notes and melody. This is what Bai Juyi said, "Silence is better than sound at this time."

Dong: Our brains have a kind of sound inertia. After you listen to something very absorbedly, when it suddenly stops there, although the sound is gone, it is still there in your head. Circling around, this is called "circling the beam for three days". If we cannot leave this time blank, the most beautiful things will be deeply obliterated. The essence of this blank space is to throw a climax parabola to the inertia of your brain.

Wu: It seems to stop, but in fact it starts another melody that you can’t hear. Therefore, our most passionate voices and most meaningful words often have a particularly interesting blank space behind them, and this is true even when making products.

Dong: When I was reading Zhuangzi two days ago, there was a sentence called "If it is empty, it is not true." He said that a decent person seems to be very humble, but he never flatters you. After you finish speaking, he will always leave a little space. When you don't speak and I don't speak, let everyone reflect on what they just said. This incident fully demonstrates that our ancients, those smart people and those who feel the truth of the matter, realized that in addition to the objective world, we also need to give the subjective world a little parabola. The field itself constitutes the weight and the Atmosphere, constitutes influence, and constitutes charm.

Winter: The sixth piece of advice Shunryu Suzuki gave to Steve Jobs is to cultivate a so-called sense of ritual. He said that in fact, you should have some kind of ritual before you eat, do things, clean, start something, or even go to bed. Why is this so? It actually kind of reassures you that you're doing it.

Wu: Being respectful means that when you do something, you treat it as a ritual. Whether it’s getting up or even going to the toilet, you have to “recognize the reality of the moment”, which means you have to take the things in front of you very seriously, and seriousness means this. We don’t do things seriously. We think about poetry, the distance, and other things in everything we do. This state is called carelessness, and you don’t do everything well.

The so-called ritual is to adjust people's psychological frequency to a fixed channel. I have read an article that sounds a bit silly, and its title is very good, "Without a sense of ritual, you will be miserable in your life." I believe this more and more. I have a very direct experience, that is, you can tell immediately how good a company is by dealing with their public relations. No matter what level of company you are, you can tell by looking at its reception etiquette. It doesn't necessarily mean it's grand or extravagant, but you can see unreliable companies and reliable companies from the quasi-ritualistic things they do. If you come into contact with a company that has a public relations department that doesn't speak well, the boss will definitely make a lot of typos when making PPT.

Dong: Tip No. 7 is to allocate good time for specific things. Specific times of the day are used to complete specific tasks, such as bathing time, working time, and meal time. If you can keep these times regularly, you can allocate your time reasonably. Whether it's contemplation while working or cleaning or exercising or quiet time, if it's important and needs to be done regularly, consider allocating time for it.

Wu: This is back to an old topic, but it is also a very important topic, "Proficiency comes from hard work, and waste comes from play; success comes from thinking, and failure comes from casualness." Many projects have declined, including The decline of time in personal management is inseparable from two words, "playful" and "casual". What Toshitaka Suzuki said is actually to remind us to detect and kill the "play virus" and "follow virus" in your life and work. Its power to devour our energy and devour our time has been completely underestimated by us.

Anchor is an anchor. You must have something to anchor yourself to throughout your life, year, and day. Without this, you become a ship in the ocean, drifting with the current.

Only with "precepts" can there be "boundaries".

Dong: No. 8, spend some time meditating. A brain science expert told me that when you are 90% alert, you have to reach 100%. You can't complete this 10% even if you sleep for 10 hours. But when you are very tired, you can reach 100% in 5 minutes. Sleeping or meditating can replenish 80%.

Wu: I was reading a book recently called "Deliberate Rest". Many times our rest is not intentional, or we simply don’t know how to turn off our own switch, and we can’t turn it off even if we want to.

Most of the operations of our body are not controlled by your consciousness. For example, digestion is not something you need to worry about. I don’t talk about health maintenance, but I know how to get along well with my body. To get along well, you need to understand the body's temperament and discuss it with your body. Our body is the most familiar and unfamiliar object that each of us has to deal with. It follows us everywhere like a shadow. It seems to be you, but you don't know how to get along with it at all. Meditation is an opportunity to get in touch with your body.

Dong: Number 9 is about smiling and serving others.

In fact, sometimes our external smile can be projected back to our heart. Even when you are unhappy, if you smile slightly, your heart will open up a little bit.

Wu: The Japanese emphasize that they should raise the corners of their mouth three times a day. This is actually a common psychological rule. When you are forced into a state, it is forced at first, but once you repeat these forced actions and forced states, it will automatically enter this state.

Dong: There is a saying that is very good. Sometimes we cry because of sadness, but many times we are also sad because of crying; sometimes we are happy because of laughter, and sometimes we are also happy because of joy. And laugh. The two interact from the inside to the outside and from the outside to the inside.

Wu: The cause and effect here is a mapping game. The first time I experienced a mapping game was in an elevator. There were mirrors on three sides. It was very magical. There are such mapping devices in museums abroad. The slightest movement from you can cause overall turmoil. Your initial cause will continue to amplify after being mapped, and the continuously amplified effect will in turn become a cause to affect you. After affecting you, you will enter this mapping game as a cause. We also follow the rules of this mapping game in our daily lives.

Dong: Just like when we sometimes discuss the topic of children's education, we always say that it is very simple to educate this child. You don't need to educate him first. You become such a person yourself. It will also affect him, and he will affect you. In fact, real children's education is mutual education.

By educating others, you educate yourself. In fact, the essence of children's education is to complete a closed-loop game in this process. How can you make the process of educating children, children also educate you, you also educate yourself, and he also educates himself? These two rings are set together. Rings are actually quite fun.

Dong: There are three more. One is to turn cleaning and cooking into a certain meditative state, called meditation. Just focus on it without thinking about it, and you just focus on doing it, even if it's cleaning or cooking.

Wu: There is another translation of this word, called meditation. It doesn't have to be meditation. When you think of meditation, you always think of someone sitting in that place. What he is talking about is meditation, letting the mind settle down, doing something quietly, and when you are immersed in this thing, you will feel particularly quiet. This is the most enjoyable feeling.

Dong: Article 11, just think about what is necessary. That is to say, you always have to be aware that some things are necessary. There are too many choices in our real life, so what to do and what not to do often cause us a lot of trouble. In fact, there is a very simple rule. Just like when we used to do questions, you may not necessarily know what is right. You may do the elimination method first to eliminate something first. When you think about what is necessary, ask yourself a question, what is not necessary?

Wu: Drucker said that mankind has never faced so many choices as it does today. Today we have gained great freedom, which means that you may make a lot of meaningless actions, and behind the meaningless actions are actually meaningless choices. A philosopher said that you should speak as if you were leaving a legacy. Because there are only a few sentences, and the most important thing must be the first thing. You can’t say all the important things, and you will probably finish the first half of the sentence without the second half. Also, always think of your current time as the last day or year of your life. At this time, you will be subject to a huge constraint. Only under constraints can people do truly meaningful things. The lack of constraints on the surface can give you freedom, but it gives you too much playfulness and too many meaningless choices, so you must learn to give yourself various constraints. The so-called living in the face of death actually means that you are asked to think about how to live in the face of a huge and irresistible constraint.

Dong: The last one is to live a simple life. Live as simply as possible and delete as much as possible what is unnecessary and unimportant.

Wu: There is another talented person behind Spielberg. He is Spielberg’s editor. There is a pattern for winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Almost two-thirds of the films win the Best Film Editing award. What does it mean? It's that the ultimate success of a film depends largely on that editor. The reason why Spielberg is so awesome has a lot to do with the editor behind him. As we live this life, it is actually very important whether we can bring a very good editor. Get rid of those links that do not create value or meaning, and do less things that make nonsense. Doing less of those things means that you may do something that makes sense, that is, do the things on the idea. One must have the ability to delete or edit.

Dong: A photography teacher told me that the biggest difference between photography and painting is that painting is added one stroke at a time, while photography is subtracted one element at a time. You take away everything you don’t need and what’s left is the best photo.

Winter: These 12 points can be summed up in one word - reduction. Loss and loss, reduction and reduction, this is the way.

Wu: "In order to learn, you will get better and better, but in order to learn, you will lose more and more." If you are into academic stuff, then just increase, keep increasing, and keep adding. What you need to learn from the Tao is to do subtraction, "for the sake of the Tao, daily losses will occur, and losses will occur again and again, until you do nothing, and do nothing without doing anything."

Dong: So inaction is not a result, it is a means. In the end, through inaction, you can do everything. In fact, this is also true. Because it does well in subtraction, Apple has become the most valuable company in the world. If one day we find that this company has deviated from its philosophy of subtraction, maybe we can consider going to the market to look at another company that has successfully done subtraction.