What seven months in Indian villages taught him about how minds actually work

When Jobs was young, his father took him to the family's dairy farm in Wisconsin, and he watched a calf being born. Within minutes it struggled to its feet and began to walk. 'It was not something she had learned, but it was instead hardwired into her,' he said later. 'A human baby couldn't do that. I found it remarkable, even though no one else did.' It was an early sign of something that would preoccupy him for the rest of his life: the difference between what is reasoned out and what is simply known.

Years later, after dropping out of Reed College, Jobs spent seven months traveling through India with his friend Daniel Kottke, sick with dysentery for part of it, seeking a guru who turned out to be dead by the time he arrived. He came home shaved-headed and sun-darkened, and his parents walked past him twice at the airport before recognizing their own son. But what stayed with him was not the guru. It was something about how people in rural India seemed to think.

'The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world,' he reflected years afterward, sitting in his own garden. 'Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.' He went further, arguing that Western rational thought is not something built into human beings at all, but a skill Western civilization happened to develop, at some cost to the intuitive capacities that villages in India had kept.

His argument, and it is very much his own argument rather than settled fact, was practical, not mystical. 'If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is,' he said. 'If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things.' Zen practice with the teacher Kobun Chino Otogawa deepened this conviction over decades. Daniel Kottke, who watched it happen, said simply, 'Steve is very much Zen. It was a deep influence.' Jobs would go on to insist that this instinct, not analysis, was what let him sense what people wanted before they could say it themselves.

Try sitting still for a few minutes without trying to calm anything, and just notice how loud your own mind actually is, because Jobs argued that fighting that restlessness only makes it worse. Give the quiet time to arrive on its own rather than forcing it, since he believed that only after the noise settles does room open up to hear something more subtle. When a hunch and a spreadsheet disagree, don't automatically side with the spreadsheet, test the hunch in some small, low-stakes way first. Afterward, go back and ask what the instinct had picked up on that the analysis missed entirely, because that is how intuition earns your trust instead of just demanding it.