Steve Jobs was not a psychic

A few times a week I look at the Speaking Pro Central web site to look at their list of about three dozen trending articles. But when I do about half are silly ones from Jane Genova that aren't related to public speaking.  

On April 28, 2019 at her Speechwriter-Ghostwriter blog Jane Genova posted with the title Steve Jobs – Was he psychic & did that help with product development? On April 27, 2019 she had posted with the title “Small Fry” – How it was growing up Steve Jobs’ Illegitimate Daughter about a 2018 book written by Lisa Brennan-Jobs. In the April 28 post she speculated that Jobs must have been psychic - since had told his daughter both that someday he would be famous, and that he would die young. That speculation merely is wishful thinking based on hilariously shallow research. That book said something more specific and different about him dying. Lisa’s mother reportedly said:

“When they were dating in high school, even before they started selling the blue boxes that let you call anywhere in the world for free, he predicted that he would become famous. ‘How did he know?’ ‘He just did,’ she said. ‘He also said he’d die young, in his early forties.’ I was pretty sure that since the first prediction was right, the second one would be right too. I began to think of him as a kind of prophet, with loneliness and tragedy at the edges.”

And Lisa also reported:

“ ‘I’m going to die in my early forties,’ my father said to me around this time. He’d come to pick me up at a friend’s house for the first time. His delivery was dramatic, as if to stir some action, but there was no action I could see to take. Forty seemed pretty old from my vantage point of eight.”

If Jobs really was a psychic, then his prediction would have been correct, and he would actually have died in his early forties. A few seconds checking of  the Wikipedia article about him reveals that instead he lived over a decade longer to age 56 - dying from pancreatic cancer.

An October 11, 2011 article in Rolling Stone by Jeff Goodell titled The Steve Jobs Nobody Knew reported:

“ ‘Steve always had that James Dean, live-fast, die-young thing,’ says Steve Capps, one of the key programmers on the first Apple Macintosh. As they worked late into the night to design and build the device that would revolutionize personal computing, Jobs would talk about death a lot. ‘It was a little morbid,’ Capps recalls. ‘He’d say, ‘I don’t want to be 50.'  Brennan recalls Jobs making similar comments when he was only 17. ‘Steve always believed he was going to die young,’ Brennan says. ‘I think that’s part of what gave his life such urgency. He never expected to live past 45.’ ”

The Wikipedia article refers to the official biography by Walter Isaacson which indicates he consulted a psychic:

“To the horror of his friends and wife, Jobs decided not to have surgery to remove the tumor, which was the only accepted medical approach. “I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,” he told me years later with a hint of regret. Specifically, he kept to a strict vegan diet, with large quantities of fresh carrot and fruit juices. To that regimen he added acupuncture, a variety of herbal remedies, and occasionally a few other treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting people around the country, including a psychic.”

How did Jane miss the details? She was way too busy cranking out three blog posts on the 27th and four on the 28th to do a careful job on Jobs.

An image of Felix the Cat came from Wikimedia Commons.