Turtleneck-Man: Conserving Energy for What Matters Most

Tell me if this picture looks familiar

Steve Jobs as we know and love him in his later years as the brilliant CEO and creative spark that restored Apple to its former glory.

The guy who re-took control of the company he had co-founded in 1976 with Steve Wozniak and taken to the pinnacle of tech and business glory.

Who was then kicked out of the company in a hostile takeover, because of his arrogance. The fallen son — a long ways away from former glory. But there’s a twist. The fallen son and hero returns to save the kingdom.

To save the company he built from bankruptcy and oblivion. To restore it to the most admired, innovative and — at one point — most valuable company in the world.

It’s Luke Skywalker.

It’s Jesus Christ.

It’s a classic hero’s journey. True Campbell-esque story-arc.

The story of Steve Jobs and how he returned Apple to glory after falling from the heights of stardom is both fascinating and intriguing.

As a person we knew he could be quirky, moody, arrogant, demanding and incredibly hard to work for. But also inspiring, and enabling. He could make you do your best work. And then outdo yourself. And then make you do it again.

Jobs was a creative genius. His influence on the modern world is impossible to overstate.

But how did he get to this level? What are the keys to Jobs enormous output?

Besides a Rockefeller-ish working spirit, brilliant persuasion skills and a keen eye for simplicity and user-friendly design he was just like you and me.

Granted, these are skills that he built up over the years and he embodied skill-stacking better than most. From calligraphy to charisma. From design to destructive creativity, he mastered it all.

However, he also used a few hacks that we can employ in our daily lives.

Let’s look at the most obvious one.

The Turtleneck

For years Jobs wore the same outfit every day.

This seems a bit crazy — or at the very least eccentric.

It would seem the dude could afford to wear a button-down every once in a while.

So the questions beckons.

Why?

Why didn’t he wear clothes the way most people do?

You know: different day, different outfit?

Because Jobs knew intuitively, what psychologist Roy Baumeister discovered in 2003 — namely that the quality of our decisions decreases with the number of choices we have to make. In other words, we get tired from making decisions, and we make worse decisions the more we have to make.

Jobs’ job at Apple was to make decisions. Good decisions. That means that the more ideas he could eliminate, the more energy he could conserve for the ideas and decisions that really matter.

Decision fatigue is part of a larger psychological framework called ego depletion. The idea that our mental ability is like a muscle, in the sense that there is only so much force we can exert before the muscle gets tired.

We use this muscle for everything from self-control to controlling emotional responses — which explains why you’re quicker to anger when you’re tired. This muscle also controls decision making.

As Walter Issacson explains in his biography on Jobs, there was an underlying minimalism to the Apple-founders life and work.

Everything that wasn’t crucial to the product was eliminated. That thinking also explained why Jobs sought to eliminate decisions in his private life. Every decision eliminated was a small battle won. Every decision that he could eliminate contributed to making a better product.

And a better product meant a better world.

This small hack might seem insignificant, but it adds up over time.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that putting on a black turtleneck every day will turn you in to the next Steve Jobs, but it can’t hurt to use his brilliant little hack.