[Pilgrimage] Walk, Fail, Prune, Return: A Creator’s 4-Day Field Guide to Steve Jobs’s Path (2/2)

Day 3: Wilderness and Tempering

Trail Course: The exile’s path to NeXT, and then to Light (Pixar).

Behind shining success, there is always a dark, long time of ‘wilderness’. Today, we walk the space of time when he lost everything, yet gained what was most important.

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Location 1: NeXT Computers HQ

After being cast out of Apple, the company he built, he founded NeXT here. A perfect cube. Uncompromising aesthetics. The market was cold, but here he developed the operating system that would later become the heart of Apple. Failure was not the end, but the most severe process of tempering for what was to come.

Commentary: There are times in life of the ‘wilderness’. Times of being pushed away, ignored, feeling like a failure. But that time is not failure. When the path you are walking feels like a dead end, what we must remember is perhaps not ‘what’s next’, but the ‘tempering’ of this very moment.

• Name: Oracle (Formerly NeXT Computers HQ)
• Address: 900 Chesapeake Dr, Redwood City, CA 94063, USA
• Practical Info: Currently part of the Oracle campus. We gaze at the building from the outside, imagining his insistence, his despair, and the strength to rise again.

Location 2: Pixar Animation Studios

A small graphics company he acquired. Here, where no one was paying attention, he encountered ‘story’. He learned here how to move a person’s heart. He realized the power of a space where creative people could meet, collide, and create synergy freely.

Commentary: Technology is cold. But story is warm. He saw here the power of technology when it meets a moving story. Whatever it is we are making, for it to reach a person’s heart, it needs not cold function, but a warm story. What story do you want to tell?

• Name: Pixar Animation Studios
• Address: 1200 Park Ave, Emeryville, CA 94608, USA
• Practical Info: The campus is not open to the public, but the sculpture at the main gate symbolically shows the power of ‘story’.

Day 4: The Return, and Completion

Trail Course: From the office of the one who returned, to the eternal circle he left behind.

On the final day, we follow the footsteps of the one who returned after crossing the wilderness. The small idea that began in a garage, at last, remained on this earth in a colossal, perfect form.

Location 1: Apple Campus (1 Infinite Loop)

In 1997, he returned here. And the first thing he did was ‘prune’. He cut hundreds of projects down to just a few. ‘Think Different’. His voice was no longer the whisper from a garage. It was a clear declaration to the world.

Commentary: What is more difficult than adding something, is taking something away. When we are lost in complexity, what we need is the courage to erase the unnecessary. What must you prune away, for your essence to shine most clearly?

• Name: Apple Campus
• Address: 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, USA
• Practical Info: It is an employee-only space, but walking the perimeter is enough to feel the energy of ‘retrospection’ and ‘focus’.

Location 2: Apple Park Visitor Center

Our final step. His final vision. A great circle with no beginning and no end. A space where the boundary between nature and technology has vanished. This is not a mere building, but the evidence of a philosophy one person completed over a lifetime. The small thought that began in a garage has, here, attained a form that breathes forever.

Commentary: If one person’s philosophy could take a visible form, would it look like this? What is the one single sentence you want to prove over your lifetime? If it were to remain on this earth, what form would you wish it to take? At the end of this journey, which began in the silence of a garage, we quietly hold this question.

• Name: Apple Park Visitor Center
• Address: 10600 N Tantau Ave, Cupertino, CA 95014, USA
• Practical Info: The visitor center is open to the public. Go up to the rooftop, gaze at the great circle, and conclude this long journey.

Closing the Journey

For four days, we traced one person’s trajectory. In all those spaces, he followed only one thing: the voice that echoed from within his own self.

Do not let the countless noises of the world swallow the voice within you. If your sincerity is present in the path you walk, in the thing you make, that is enough.

Just as the small whisper that began in the garage eventually became a great resonance that echoed through the world.

Steve Jobs journey guide book

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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” — Steve Jobs