options the secret life of steve jobs phần 6 potx

“It does,” I say. “It saps my energy. It drains me. Then I have

to come back here and sit down and try to be creative again. It

never lets up. I don’t need to be doing this. I could go sit on a

beach for the rest of my life. I could be out racing sailboats, like

Larry Ellison. I could be running some bogus philanthropy like

Bill Gates. But am I? No. Like a fool, I’m still coming in to work

every day. I’m still putting in eighteen-hour days. I’m working my

ass off. Battling with engineers. Yelling at idiots. Firing people.

Getting hassled by everyone. Traveling too much. Never getting

enough sleep. Why? Why am I doing this?”

“We’ve talked about this,” Linghpra says. “It’s the hole. The

hole in your soul, remember?”

“What are you, Doctor fucking Seuss? What’s with the

rhyming?”

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” He pauses. He gathers his thoughts.

“There’s an emptiness,” he says. “A vacuum. You try to fill it

with work.”

“I never should have gone to China. That kid. I can’t stop

thinking about him. All I want to do is make the world a better

place. I have a gift. I want to share it. But it hurts. It physically

hurts me. And then I get back here and my own government is

attacking me. They’re making me out to be a criminal. For what?

Because I got paid for my work. Paid well, fair enough. Paid a

lot. But look at the value I delivered. Apple’s market value has

grown sixty billion dollars since I took over. Sixty. Billion. Dol￾lars. I go in every day, I’m doing a thousand things at once, and

somehow, okay, maybe somehow, along the way, I made a mis￾take. Maybe. For this they want to put me in jail? After all I’ve

done for the world? Because of a typo? I should be getting the

Nobel Prize. Instead they’re measuring my neck.”

“You’re right. It’s not fair.”

“And do you know what’s going to happen? Nobody’s going

to want to run a public company anymore. Because you can’t do

117

0306815842-02.qxd 8/9/07 2:18 PM Page 117

the job. Nobody can. You make one slip, you interpret one thing

the wrong way, and boom—you’re a swindler. You’re running a

scam. You’re lying to shareholders. You’re perpetrating a fraud

on the American public.”

I stop. I take a deep breath and let it out. I roll my neck, try￾ing to release the tension.

“This is good,” Linghpra says. “This is good work.”

I can’t help it. I start to cry.

“Let it out,” Linghpra says. “The tears are cleansing.”

He leans forward and takes my forearms in his hands. It’s an

energy flow exercise that we do. You form a circuit and let

energy move back and forth between two people, using a form of

emotional osmosis. My anger seeps away into him, and his calm￾ness flows into me. He’s acting like a radiator, taking the heat

from my soul and dissipating it out into the room, returning my

energy back to me in a cooler state.

Soon I’m letting go. I begin to sob. Big, heavy, gulping sobs.

Linghpra guides me down onto a yoga mat. I lie on my side, with

my legs curled up. He lies behind me, cradling me.

“You’re a good person,” he says.

He pulls himself against me. He holds me tight in his arms

and we stay like that for a long time, while he tells me how

good I am, and how whatever bad that’s happened, it’s not my

fault.

118

0306815842-02.qxd 8/9/07 2:18 PM Page 118