Steve Jobs, The Beatles, & Phil Knight

Hey fellow humans — welcome to issue #14

In case you were wondering about my three-week silence, I was traveling and unexpectedly stuck in Dubai due to the war unfolding in the region. For me writing meaningful content requires presence, clarity, and emotional bandwidth and for a few weeks, my focus was simply on navigating the situation and finding stability again.

Interestingly, today’s topic is deeply personal because I have experienced this pattern firsthand. One of the best decisions I made in June 2025 after the acquisition of my company was booking a one-way ticket to Europe. I lived nomadically for several months, moving from city to city, staying with friends and family, exploring unfamiliar places, and allowing myself to step away from the relentless pace of startup life. There was no rigid plan, no fixed destination -  just movement, reflection, and space. It was during this period of wandering and disconnection from the usual noise that the idea for Human X.0 first emerged. Looking back, I now see that the travel itself created the mental and emotional space for that vision to surface.

Today's issue breaks down:

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So what do Steve Jobs, The Beatles, and Phil Knight have in common? 

Before Apple existed, before Nike had a name, before the White Album was ever conceived — there was a journey.

Not a business trip. Not a conference. A soul-journey. A deliberate stepping out of the familiar, into the unknown. A willingness to be disoriented, disrupted, and dismantled — so that something entirely new could be born.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

In 1974, a 19-year-old Jobs quit his job at Atari, bought a one-way ticket to India, and spent months wandering ashrams, learning meditation, and absorbing a radically different way of engaging with reality. The trip was brutal — dysentery, disorientation, shaved heads, sleeping in abandoned buildings. He never found the guru he was looking for. But he found something more enduring: a philosophy of subtraction.

He returned as a Buddhist, a meditator, and a man rewired. Two years later, he co-founded Apple.

In his own words: "The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead... Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work."

The minimalism that defines every Apple product — the white space, the ruthless removal of the unnecessary — was born in those dusty Himalayan villages. Not in a boardroom.

The soul-journey broke his old operating system so a new one could install.

By 1967, The Beatles were the most famous human beings on the planet — and creatively running on empty. As McCartney put it: "There was a feeling of: 'It's great to be famous, it's great to be rich — but what's it all for?'"

In February 1968, all four traveled to Rishikesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. No fans. No studios. No performance obligations. Just silence, meditation, and the Ganges River flowing through the Himalayan foothills.

What emerged was one of the most remarkable creative eruptions in music history. They wrote over 48 songs — including Blackbird, Dear Prudence, Revolution, and Back in the U.S.S.R. — most of which became The White Album. Before India, Lennon had been filling songs from circus posters just to meet his quota. After India, they had more music than they knew what to do with.

Beatles biographer Bob Spitz described it simply: "Once they unburdened themselves from all of that, they reconnected with their songwriting and their creativity. It just flowed forth."

The soul-journey didn't manufacture genius. It excavated it.

Fresh out of Stanford Business School in 1962, Phil Knight had a Crazy Idea: import Japanese running shoes to America. But instead of launching immediately, he left — on a global odyssey that took him through Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Egypt, Greece, and beyond.

In Japan, he absorbed Zen philosophy and studied the cultural art of indirection — lessons that would shape every negotiation Nike ever had. In Greece, he stood before the Temple of Athena Nike and stared at a marble carving of the goddess leaning down to adjust the strap of her shoe. He stood there for what felt like hours.

Years later, his first employee dreamed the name "Nike" into existence. The world had already whispered it to Knight during those months of wandering.

In Shoe Dog, he wrote: "And yet. I was still aflame with curiosity about the world. I still wanted to see, to explore."

He wasn't delaying his dream. He was building the interior architecture that would one day hold an empire.

The soul-journey didn't delay his success. It was the foundation of it.

This isn't poetry. It's biology.

When we are locked inside our familiar environments — our routines, our relationships, our default narratives — our brains run on autopilot. Efficient, yes. But efficiency is the enemy of innovation.

Neuroscientists call this the Default Mode Network (DMN) — a system of brain regions that activates when we step back from external tasks. It is the brain's internal processing engine, responsible for imagination, daydreaming, self-reflection, and creative connection-making. Research has established the DMN as central to divergent thinking: the ability to link seemingly unrelated ideas into something entirely new.

The DMN is most generative when fed novel inputs. New environments, unfamiliar cultures, unexpected encounters break the autopilot loop and force the brain into a different mode of processing. Studies confirm that travel and cross-cultural exposure broaden the brain's associative network — expanding the raw material the DMN has to work with.

There is also a cortisol dynamic at play. Chronic high-performance stress keeps the nervous system in hypervigilance, taking the prefrontal cortex — the seat of creative thinking and strategic clarity — offline. Immersive travel creates a nervous system reset: novelty activates the brain's reward circuits, familiar stressors fall away, cortisol downregulates, and the prefrontal cortex comes back online.

This is why your best ideas come in the shower, on a walk, or on a flight. Not because those environments are magical — but because they interrupt the patterns keeping you stuck.

Clarity is not something you think your way into. It is something you create space for.

There is something science can measure, and something it cannot.

What Jobs, The Beatles, and Phil Knight all experienced was not just cognitive rewiring. It was something older — what ancient wisdom traditions have understood for millennia: the soul requires pilgrimage. It requires being stripped of the familiar, the dissolution of the false identity built by performance and external validation, so that the deeper, truer self can speak.

In many indigenous traditions, a vision quest is not a luxury. It is a rite of passage. You cannot step into your next chapter without crossing a threshold — and thresholds require you to leave where you were.

Your subconscious operating system cannot be upgraded while you are still running the same programs in the same environment. Sometimes, the most strategic thing a founder can do is leave.

You don't need to disappear for seven months. What you do need is a deliberate disruption of your pattern — long enough for the unfamiliar to speak.

1. Remove the noise before you seek the signal. Commit to a 24–48 hour information fast before you go anywhere. No podcasts, no social media, no news. Let your nervous system begin to downregulate.

2. Choose environments genuinely foreign to your nervous system. Not a familiar vacation spot. Somewhere that challenges your assumptions. Novelty is the key ingredient.

3. Build in unstructured time. The breakthroughs don't come from your itinerary. They come from the moments between — the wander, the sit, the stare at the horizon. Protect that time fiercely.

4. Bring a journal, not a laptop. What emerges on a soul-journey arrives as images, feelings, and questions — not action plans. Let it come in its native language.

5. Come back slowly. Re-entry is as important as the journey. Give yourself a buffer between the travel and the next action. Let the new wiring set.

Apple, Nike, the White Album — none of them were born at desks. They were born in the space that a soul-journey created.

Your next great creation may not need a better strategy. It may need a passport.

The soul knows where to go. Your only job is to get out of its way.

To your evolution,

Roya

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Roya Pakzad, Founder @ Human X.0