February 23, 2012
The Four Levels and Steve Jobs
By Jim Berlucchi
The Four Levels of Happiness® provides a great lens for looking closer at people and news. For example, it can help to explain why the passing of Steve Jobs had such an impact on so many people around the world. Jobs was the preeminent icon of the digital revolution, and he has been likened to inventive and entrepreneurial geniuses like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. But I would suggest that his impact and success came down to happiness. That was Jobs’ real product, and he delivered quite a lot of it.
The beauty and functionality of his products have won legions of fans. If you’ve ever been caught in the cross current of conversation among Apple users, you know what I mean. They wax eloquently about their iPads, iPhones, MacBooks, etc. Which brings us to …
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Steve Jobs unveiling the MacBook Air |
Level 1 Happiness: iTouch, you touch, we all touch
Apple users experience a good dose of what Fr. Robert Spitzer calls Level 1 happiness – the immediate and intense gratification that our senses can derive from material things. Jobs had an almost otherworldly sense for creating products that appealed to the eye, the ear, and the touch. He was a Level 1 artistic genius who created products that were not only eminently functional, but elegant in their styling and simplicity.
Level 2 Happiness: Pick yourself up, and be the best at what you love to do
Level 2 happiness corresponds with ego gratification. It describes the desire we have to achieve, to gain respect, status and popularity. It comes from using the unique talents we have and deriving personal ego satisfaction through our accomplishments.
Jobs clearly had a supercharged Level 2 drive. At the age of 20, he started Apple in his parents’ garage, working incessantly with his partner, Steve Wozniak. Ten years later, he was heading up a $2 billion dollar company with 4000 employees.
But Level 2 desires always come with a large potential for disappointment. When Jobs was 30, his board of directors fired him. “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating … I felt like I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down … I was a very public failure.”
But Job’s determination couldn’t be vanquished. “I decided to start over.” He later called his firing “the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
This personhood, argues Fr. Spitzer, with its orientation toward Level 4 happiness, defines every human being from the moment of conception. Even if that person is unplanned, unwanted, or conceived in unfortunate circumstances. And such was the situation with the embryonic Steve Jobs when he was conceived in the spring of 1954. He claims his good luck “started before I was born. My mother was a young, unwed college student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.” |
His public humiliation, “an awful- tasting medicine,” caused him to refocus on doing what he truly loved, to re-engage his talents in new endeavors.
He went on to found two new companies, NeXT and Pixar which birthed the very first computer animated film, Toy Story. When Apple bought NeXT, Jobs returned to Apple, and the technology he developed at NeXT became the heart of Apples’ technological renaissance.
There are two lessons here that all of us can apply. First, to rise from failure and start over is healthy Level 2 ego strength in action. The second point is that doing what you love can give you a lot of Level 2 happiness. As Jobs advised, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work … If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Level 3 Happiness: Leave the world a better place.
Level 2 is not enough. We still want more – a happiness that affects more people, lasts longer, and engages even our higher powers. We want to make an optimal positive difference with our lives, for the benefit of others. In short, we desire Level 3 happiness.
This is the long-term happiness that comes into focus when we reflect upon the things that material goods and personal achievement can’t deliver. For Jobs, the remembrance of death helped him focus on Level 3: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
I can’t say for sure what gave Steve Jobs Level 3 happiness. But I would guess that the happiness that his products gave to millions around the world was a source of deep satisfaction. He also seemed to find Level 3 happiness as a husband and father, as well as a grateful son to the parents who raised him.
A grateful son. Which brings us to …
Level 4 Happiness: A person’s a person no matter how small.
Level 4 may best be described as perfect happiness. Even when we’re blessed with an abundance of happiness at the other three levels, there is still something deep inside us that wants even more. Plato said we have five desires that are so strong, they are transcendental. We long for truth, love, goodness, beauty, and being. And we want an unlimited supply of these – perfectly, unconditionally, and forever.
Plato was so impressed by these desires that he uses them to prove that human beings have immortal souls that are destined for eternity. Fr. Robert Spitzer cites Plato’s five transcendental desires as evidence for what makes a person a person. He writes that “We have the essentials of an objective definition of ‘person,’ namely a being possessing an intrinsic guiding force toward fulfillment through unconditional, perfect, and even infinite truth, love, goodness, beauty, and being.”
This personhood, argues Fr. Spitzer, with its orientation toward Level 4 happiness, defines every human being from the moment of conception. Even if that person is unplanned, unwanted, or conceived in unfortunate circumstances.
And such was the situation with the embryonic Steve Jobs when he was conceived in the spring of 1954. He claims his good luck “started before I was born. My mother was a young, unwed college student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.”
Paul and Clara Jobs, a childless couple, happily received their adopted son Steve after his birth February 24, 1955. We don’t know for sure what led Joanne Schieble to reverence the life within her. But her choice is a timely reminder of the dignity and potential that gives every life transcendent meaning and value.
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Last changed: Oct 25 2011 at 10:41 AM