- Steve Jobs Jobs planned the October 2011 memorial in detail — speakers, performers, caterer — and arranged for each departing guest to receive a copy of Yogananda’s book in a plain brown box. Marc Benioff read the parting message as: ‘Actualize yourself.’ source ↗
Published in 1946, Autobiography of a Yogi is Paramahansa Yogananda's account of his childhood in India, his search for and discipleship under his guru Sri Yukteswar, and his eventual mission to bring the teachings of Kriya Yoga meditation to the West. The book blends personal narrative with encounters with saints, scientists, and mystics, framing spiritual realization as something that can be pursued with the same rigor as any discipline. It became one of the most influential texts in introducing Eastern meditation practices to a Western audience and has remained continuously in print for over seventy years.
Founders rarely read this book for tactics; they read it for temperament. Yogananda's central claim is that mastery of the self — attention, discipline, stillness — precedes mastery of anything external, which is a useful corrective for operators who assume better systems or more hours are the answer to every problem. The book's portrait of relentless, decades-long discipline in service of a single pursuit (his meditation practice, his mission to found what became the Self-Realization Fellowship) mirrors the singular obsession biographers describe in figures like Steve Jobs, who famously carried a heavily annotated copy of this book and had it distributed at his own memorial service.
The practical takeaway founders tend to extract is less about doctrine and more about the value of a daily practice that quiets reactivity — the idea that clarity of judgment, not just intensity of effort, is what compounds over a long career. It is also a reminder that many of the entrepreneurs held up as models of intensity paired that intensity with an equally serious inner practice, rather than running on willpower alone.