Your Time in the Wilderness
I recently reread “Becoming Steve Jobs,” the 2015 biography of this world-changing entrepreneur by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. I got only as far as page 12 of the prologue when three paragraphs triggered the idea for this blog. The authors mentioned the period between 1985, when Jobs was forced out by Apple’s board of directors, and his return as CEO in 1997. Here’s what they wrote:
“I keep coming back to the time that many have described as his ‘wilderness’ years, the dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return.
“These were muddled, complicated times, and not the stuff of easy headlines. But those years are in fact the critical ones of his career. That’s when he learned most everything that made his later success possible, and that’s when he started to temper and channel his behavior. To overlook those years is to fall into the trap of only celebrating success. We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience and wisdom that informed Steve’s last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years.
“Steve could be intransigent, and nothing was ever learned easily or superficially, but learn he did. Driven and curious even when things were tough, he was a learning machine during these years, and he took to heart all that he gleaned.”
If you’ve ever been fired, laid off, or resigned under duress and been out of work for an extended period of time, you have something in common with the legendary Steve Jobs (and me). You’ve likely experienced some of the same emotions he did: anger, resentment, lack of purpose, shame, and if you’re like me, you could be a real pain in the ass to be around when you were wandering in your wilderness.
In his book “Inspirational Leadership,” Richard Olivier writes about the leadership lessons he gleaned from William Shakespeare’s play “Henry V.” He refers to the night before the Battle of Agincourt as Henry’s “dark night of the soul.” We hear Henry lament, “What infinite heartsease must kings neglect that private men enjoy?”
Heartsease means peace of mind. How do we find peace of mind in our personal dark nights (and dark days) in the wilderness? It’s said that leaders are twice born, that their rebirth follows a failure that they turn into triumph by what they learn from the experience, as Steve Jobs did. Here are two thoughts to make time spent in the wilderness valuable:
- There are 24 hours in a day; if you sleep 8 hours, you have 16 hours to make yourself better. Those hours are a gift; use them to make your body fit, your mind sharp and awaken your spiritual side.
- The wilderness is a great place for self-reflection and building emotional self-awareness. A journal may be your best companion on your journey through the wilderness. Write about the experience that brought you into the wilderness. What did you learn from it? What did you do well? What mistakes did you make? What would you do differently if you had a do-over? Write it all down, reread it and rewrite it; go deep. What we learn in the wilderness affects our becoming. That is to say, how we respond to our wilderness experience can transform us.
Let your time in the wilderness test you as it tested Steve Jobs. With those tests come opportunities for personal growth and emotional self-awareness.
If you’ve spent time in the wilderness, I’d like to hear your comments. What did you learn? What advice can you offer to others on their passage through the wilderness?
Please add your thoughts to my post on LinkedIn.
(Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash)