How to Tune Your Decisions Before They Tune You

Steve Jobs, Pattern, and the Choice to Tune

A life shaped like a signal

Every creative leader knows the pull between precision and flow. It’s that fine line where control turns brittle and timing decides everything. Steve Jobs built his legend on alignment, detail, and refusal to settle, yet the same intensity that shaped Apple also shaped his fate. This article invites you to listen differently: to the undercurrent between logic and instinct, where coherence outperforms certainty, and where the art of leadership lies in knowing when to tighten the string, and when to let it ring.

Steven Paul Jobs, born 24 February 1955 and gone by 5 October 2011. He helped co-found Apple Inc. with Steve Wozniak and helped set the pace for the personal computer wave in the 1970s and 1980s. He also founded NeXT and held the chair and majority share at Pixar. At 55, his story ended far sooner than many expected. We will come back to that.

In 1974 he travelled through India seeking insight, then later studied Zen Buddhism. In 1976 he and Wozniak formed Apple to develop and sell Wozniak’s Apple I. A year later the Apple II carried them into public fame and private wealth, one of the first mass-produced microcomputers to find wide success.

He once told Bill Gates, you count as the enemy, after discovering that Microsoft planned to monetise the mouse and graphical user interface ideas he had lifted from Xerox PARC. The ethics of appropriation rarely travel in straight lines. They travel more like ripples, sometimes colliding, sometimes reinforcing.

Jobs often demanded invisible precision. He asked engineers to align internal components even though the case would later seal. When asked, why bother if no one notices, he replied, I would notice. Many master craftsmen nod at that. Early wireless sets from Marconi’s day often looked like seaweed after a storm. The inside of an Apple circuit, by contrast, needed to feel like joinery. Square, clean, true.

NAH and the accountant’s shortcut

Many founders suffer from what people often call Not Invented Here. NAH rejects ideas that originate elsewhere. Oddly, this pattern grows from persistence, a trait that often helps companies survive.

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair at Ogilvy in the UK, writes about the accountant’s mindset, where decisions collapse to a simple question, does this pay today. That frame discourages pure research, the kind that hunts for value before it gains a price. He offers the example of the doorman. Replace the person with an automatic door and you save a salary. Yet the doorman also gets you upstairs quietly when you return tipsy, knows which corner shop still lends milk at midnight, and sometimes patches your plumbing until morning. The spreadsheet rarely accounts for those side benefits.

Jobs did not follow an accountant’s mentality. He followed a Jobs mentality. The edge that made him brilliant sometimes narrowed his view. When that edge turns inward, it can cut.

What core question does this essay explore?
How leaders and creators navigate forks in the road, blending logic with intuition so their choices carry coherence rather than bravado.

Why focus on Steve Jobs?
His life offers a vivid pattern. Precision and taste lifted his companies, while a narrow stance at a crucial moment likely narrowed options in health. One life, two lessons, one pattern.

How does the doorman story relate to business decisions?
The doorman illustrates hidden value that spreadsheets often miss. Human layers carry side benefits, the late-night rescue and the quiet fix, which often decide outcomes.

Decision-Making and Pattern

How do you define NAH (Not Invented Here)?
NAH describes a habit where teams reject outside ideas from pride, identity, or control. Persistence supplies energy, then sometimes hardens into refusal.

What role does ‘tuning’ play in choices?
Tuning aligns inner signal with outer move. When signal and move rhyme, effort drops and results compound. When they clash, resistance rises and drift follows.

How can I avoid the accountant’s trap without ignoring numbers?
Use a two-column ledger. In one column, capture measurable effects. In the other, list human effects you cannot easily price. Decide only after both columns receive honest weight.

How do I bring intuition without gambling the farm?
Run small, reversible experiments. Let the material talk back. Keep the stakes low until evidence and felt-sense line up.

What if my past wins distort today’s judgment?
Name the echo. Write the old win on paper. Then ask, under today’s conditions, does that move still earn trust. If not, choose a smaller cut and retest.

The fork in the medical road

In mid 2004, Jobs received a diagnosis of a treatable form of pancreatic cancer. He leaned toward alternative medicine and reportedly delayed the recommended medical intervention for nine months. Barrie R. Cassileth, then chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s integrative medicine department, later suggested that this delay likely cost him his life. She argued that he had the treatable kind, even curable, and that delaying amounted to a form of self-harm by omission.

I hold no certainty about what pressures he felt. I suspect they ran complex and heavy. I also hold no bias against conventional treatment, nor do I dismiss complementary approaches. I simply note the pattern at the fork in the road. Belief on one side, evidence on the other. Timing in the middle.

Health, Agency, and Trust

How should I navigate conflicting medical advice?
Clarify the fork in plain language, gather reputable guidance, and locate one clinician you trust enough for a first cut. Pair conventional treatment with supportive practices that you value. Track sleep, mood, and clarity, then adjust.

Does belief alone heal or harm?
Belief shapes behaviour and timing. Treatment choices and timing shape outcomes. Treat belief as a current, not a cure. Swim with it, and keep a lifeguard within reach.

Practice and Application

What single habit improves complex decisions fastest?
Keep a coherence diary. After each step, note energy, clarity, and ease. Patterns emerge, and the next step often reveals itself without strain.

How do I notice hidden value, like the doorman’s?
Run the “Midnight Key Test.” Ask, when things go wrong at 1 a.m., who or what actually saves the day. Fund that.

A small harpoon from my own harbour

When my right eye began to ripple lines and bend door frames, my GP referred me to an optometrist who then sent me to an eye clinic. The diagnosis, wet macular degeneration. I read widely. Some alternative voices suggested nutritional or energetic protocols. Conventional voices recommended injections at regular intervals. I arrived for my first hospital appointment with a list of questions.

The doctor who answered them spoke with a different cadence than mine. He came from a hospital I knew well, one whose corridors I had walked as an external trainer shortly before returning to England. The coincidence startled me. I felt trust rise, like a tide you cannot argue with. I said yes to the injection.

Years later I no longer receive injections, only monitoring. I feel grateful for timing, craft, and a touch of grace.

Maps and mirrors, not just medicine

So where does this leave us. Many decisions, medical or business, reduce to how we balance the logical with the illogical. We carry personal histories like varnish on a wooden hull. The grain still shows, but the finish changes how water runs. Jobs studied Zen. I trained teams in hospitals. Both experiences altered how choice felt at the moment of contact.

Think of decision-making as joinery. The plan gives you the cut list. The grain tells you which way the wood prefers to split. The glue line demands pressure and patience. Accountancy handles the plan. NAH arrives when pride ignores the grain. Wisdom attends to the glue line, where small misalignments become creaks, then cracks.

Here a quiet idea hums in the background, the way a tuning fork hums in a workshop. Patterns echo across scale. You hear the same note in product design and in bedside choices. Not because fate writes everything in advance but, rather, because coherence tends to repeat. When your inner tone and your outer move sing the same note, doors open with less force. When they clash, resistance rises. The world answers the signal you carry.

What Jobs teaches without intending to

Many hold Jobs up as a hero. Design clarity, fierce focus, refusal to accept shoddy work, all of that continues to inspire. Yet hero stories often flatten a person into a statue. Statues hide the joints. Lives show them.

So perhaps his legacy invites a subtler read. He loved control and cared about resonance. He pushed teams until small things aligned. That alignment helped millions. The same posture possibly blocked him at a crucial fork. The habit that delivered excellence in product may have narrowed his field in health. Pattern, rather than punishment.

Practical cut list for complex choices

Name the fork.
Write the decision in plain language. Two paths, one page. Ambiguity muddies timing.

Audit the echo.
Ask, which past win or wound currently colours my stance. Not to assign blame, but to check for NAH.

Separate plan from grain.
Plan with data. Then test the grain with small, reversible moves. Let the material tell you something.

Borrow trusted hands.
Find one practitioner you trust enough to do the first cut. If you feel the tide of trust rise, honour it. If not, wait one tide cycle, then ask again.

Keep a coherence diary.
Note how each step affects sleep, mood, and clarity. Coherence often shows up first as quiet ease.

Refine the joinery.
When the inside and the outside still fight, pick one small behaviour that honours both. If the doctor advises injections, pair them with a supportive practice that you believe helps. Let pragmatism and meaning share the bench.

The doorman test

Return to Sutherland’s doorman. In business and in health, the doorman represents the human layer that numbers miss. A good doorman looks like low ROI until the night your key snaps. Then value reveals itself in seconds. Keep room in your model for that kind of value. It often decides outcomes.

A closing view across the water

Jobs changed how many of us work, learn, and listen to music. From far beyond our line of sight, one wonders how he now holds his own story. Perhaps he sees not victory or failure, but the shape of a pattern. Design rigour that lifted a generation of tools. A narrow streak that, left unchecked, proved costly. The same wave, two phases.

For the rest of us, the lesson feels plain. Build with precision. Honour the field you carry. When you reach a fork, tune both map and compass. Then move with coherence, not bravado.

Heroes fade. Patterns teach.

And teaching serves longer than legend.

A Five-Day Tuning Sprint

Day 1 — Name the Fork
Write the live decision on one page. Two paths, one sentence each. No hedging.

Day 2 — Audit the Echo
List the past wins and wounds that pull on this choice. Circle the loudest echo. Plan one move that reduces its pull.

Day 3 — Two-Column Ledger
Left column, measurable effects. Right column, human effects. Choose a next action that respects both columns.

Run two micro-scenarios.
Best plausible and worst plausible, not fantasy extremes. Ask what small move helps in both.

Day 4 — Small, Reversible Experiment
Run a pilot you can unwind in a week. Gather signals, not just opinions. Note energy, sleep, and clarity that follow.

Day 5 — Decide, then Support the Decision
Commit to the next step. Pair it with one supportive practice that nourishes you or your team, something simple you can repeat.

Mastery rarely means holding the line; it means knowing when to retune the instrument while the work continues to play.