“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”

First published 13 November 2016 · revised August 2026. The original argued from what I had seen in clinic. Research published since has measured it.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. […] Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
— Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address, 2005

By the time he gave that speech he had already had surgery for a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour, and had said it saved his life. What he did not say was that for roughly nine months after the diagnosis he declined that surgery, against the advice of his physicians, his friends and his family, and tried a range of alternative approaches instead.

Let me say at the outset that I admire Jobs as a creative figure and an entrepreneur, that I have never seen his medical records, and that everything I know about his illness comes from Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography and Jobs’s own public statements. I am not trying to pass judgement on a dying man’s choices. I write about the case because it illustrates, unusually clearly and in public, a pattern I have watched repeat in ordinary consulting rooms for twenty years.

How could a man that intelligent make that decision?

I do not think he was stupid, and I do not think he was in simple denial. He was extraordinarily clever, and he had good advice from every direction. Which is the point. Intelligence is not protective here. If anything, the people I have found hardest to reach are those most accustomed to reasoning their way past received opinion — because that habit has served them brilliantly everywhere else.

Five mistakes, and why they recur

These frame a pattern of reaction I see repeatedly in patients drawn to “natural” treatment when a frightening diagnosis lands.

1. Magical thinking

Isaacson, describing Jobs’s response to the diagnosis, put it this way:

I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking…
— Walter Isaacson, on Steve Jobs

This was Jobs’s own cast of mind — the same refusal to accept given constraints that colleagues called his reality distortion field, and which had genuinely produced remarkable things at Apple. Applied to a tumour, it did not work. It has not worked for anyone.

2. Not wanting the body “violated”

I didn’t want my body to be opened… I didn’t want to be violated in that way.
— Steve Jobs, quoted in Isaacson

This is not the same as ordinary fear of the knife, and I have heard versions of it many times. There is a deep intuition that the body is whole and that cutting it is a form of harm — which, viewed narrowly, it is. Surgery is controlled injury. The difficulty is that the alternative on offer was not wholeness; it was a tumour left in place.

3. Natural first, conventional later

I hear this constantly, and I have sympathy with the impulse behind it. Doctors are frequently too rushed to discuss diet, exercise, sleep or stress. Some are genuinely ignorant of them and reach for the prescription pad by default. That is a real failing and I have written about it elsewhere.

But look at the actual standard of care for chronic disease — hypertension, dyslipidaemia, type 2 diabetes — and therapeutic lifestyle change sits at the front of every guideline, ahead of medication. The dichotomy is largely imagined.

Two further points. Everything on earth is chemical, including every herb ever brewed; “natural” and “chemical” is not a real distinction. And more importantly, lifestyle measures are powerful at preventing disease and much weaker at reversing it once established. Relying on diet and herbs to cure an existing cancer is like hoping that driving under the speed limit will fix a leaking radiator.

4. Preferring alternative medicine to treatment that works

There are no good studies showing cure of islet cell pancreatic cancer by alternative medicine. That is not a claim that everything under the alternative heading is worthless — some of it is ordinary good advice wearing an unusual hat.

What bothers me is the substitution. I see it constantly with blood pressure: “Let me try this supplement for a while, doc, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll do what you said.” The trial period is rarely free.

5. Disregarding “dogma”

Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

Excellent advice for finding your purpose, or for breaking the assumptions that keep an industry stuck. Considerably worse advice for treating a tumour.

We live in an age where it is neither practical nor possible to break new ground at every turn. We rely on other people’s thinking constantly, and rightly. Would you rather spend years in a laboratory reinventing the light bulb, or flip the switch? Knowing when to overturn the consensus and when to accept it is most of what wisdom consists of — and a diagnosis is a poor place to practise the former.

What I am not saying

That he would have lived had he operated sooner. Nobody can know that. Neuroendocrine tumours vary widely in aggressiveness, and it is entirely possible the outcome would have been the same. One case establishes nothing.

That patients who choose otherwise are foolish. Almost everyone who takes this path is frightened, and is trying to keep hold of some control in a situation that has taken all of it away. That is a human response, not a stupid one.

And I am not saying doctors are blameless. The reason “natural first” is so appealing is partly that conventional medicine often communicates badly, rushes people, and neglects exactly the lifestyle factors that would have helped. We built some of this ourselves.

What I am saying is narrower: when a treatable cancer is present, the cost of the trial period is measured in survival, and it has now been counted.