Steve Jobs's Real Genius

Gladwell is kinda famous, written a couple of best sellers and stuff.

That said opinions on him vary, his primary MO is to tell the audience something that contradicts common knowledge and provide enough facts to back it up, thereby making his audience feel smarter, which people love.

On the other hand it's often just enough facts, and it's often technically true but a very shallow truth.

I feel like this question is asked every time something from the New Yorker is posted to HN, and I feel old every time, even though I'm in my twenties.

Since a writing class I took was probably one of my favorite courses in college, I used to hold writers in high regard as creative people.

Not anymore. For example, what Gladwell just wrote simply illustrates that he has no knowledge whatsoever of how creative process works. For one, all creativity is tweaking. Einstein obtained his relativity theory by basically iteratively tweaking known theories and some others until they looked good enough and fit the observed facts. Not trying to diminish what Einstein did in any way -- very few people if any at the time would have been able to tweak just the right equations. In addition, that iterative tweaking Einstein did required a helluva lot of thinking, something Gladwell surely didn't bother with.

Getting back to Gladwell -- I hope it is clear now that what one ends up with is a world-famous writer who doesn't understand creativity yet manages to write with an "intellectual" voice and publish in The New Yorker.

This is very troubling.

Barely any visual artist or sculptor or architect or even a musician one could name would fall into the category of those who don't understand how creative process works. Yet writers routinely do fall into that category. Not all writers, I'm sure -- I bet Shakespeare knew a few things about creative process that he could teach even Jobs. Yet a disturbingly large proportion of writers -- like 80% of them have no idea what they are talking about when they are talking about creativity.

Only goes to show that one doesn't necessarily need to be creative to speak or write well -- it is enough to serve as a relatively dumb medium through which a fixed language (invented by someone else) passes through.

There is some, but not nearly as much as say what's in win32. This lack of 'crust' can be attributed to SJ's personality. He had no problems dropping something he didn't think worked. This led to headaches for 3rd parties, and is one of the primary reasons enterprise stayed away from Apple (along with no roadmaps).

How can you lead if you don't understand fully the field.

It's not so much that you need to understand every in and out of the field. What you need to understand is effort level required develop something[1], and when you're clearly getting BSed. How much technical knowledge you need to do those two things is the hard part to figure out.

[1] I once had a manager ask me why a change was going to take so long because she thought "it's just and if/then statement."

  1. Build a talented team.
  2. Keep it small.
  3. Give them time.
  4. Keep them focused on the end goal not the internals of the project.
  5. Cut all non essential features.