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Think different about Jobs

james.cridland.net

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Re: Think different about Jobs

#131

Post by matwood »

nirvana wrote: post #79
MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you'd have even fewer nice things to say about iCon, the unauthorized biography, which lacks the sugarcoating present in Isaacson. Also, no, this isn't Startup News, this isn't Entrepreneur News, this is Hacker News, and I don't think you should discard what that implies about the community.

When I started out, a Hacker was an electronics or computer enthusiast. Steve Jobs was a hacker, though overshadowed by Woz, of course. I am as well. I watched as the media took that innocent word, with its origins in the MIT student railroad club (see Steven Levy's Hackers ) and twisted it to mean "people who break into computers and cause chaos". From reading PG's writings, it appears to him the word means technolo…

I'm well aware that there's an ideological movement out there that has been around for about a century that sees the labor of muscles as the only thing to value and that devalues the labors of the mind. This movement is incompatible with hacking, which is intrinsically an effort of the mind.

I don't agree that the labor of muscles and the labor of the mind are distinct incompatible movements. It takes a strong mind to properly control muscles. Why use labor haphazardly when thinking allows the use more effectively?

Then there is research showing that exercise improves cognitive function. To tie it back to the article at hand, SJ seemed to love his long walks.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#132

Post by matwood »

loso wrote: post #82
brisance wrote: post #29

Anyone else read Sam Smith's "The Jordan Rules"? Jordan is without doubt one of the greatest, if not the greatest, basketball player the world has seen. He is also known to be egotistical, as many competitive athletes/alpha males are (it's probably the testosterone). Like Steve Jobs, Jordan would not suffer fools gladly, would "bully" team-mates, had laser-focus etc. Had a good wingman in the form of Pippen (Tim Cook…

Have you seen the perception of Jordan lately? I was and probably still am one of the biggest Jordan fans ever but he's a dick and as a fan I have to admit it. His former teammates do not have many nice things to say about him and the people he played against even less so. Right now there are a bunch of young NBA players, who grew up watching Jordan's accomplishments, considering boycotting Jordan brand sneakers beca…

From watching Jordan it appears to me his self motivational technique was to make everything personal. Of course it makes him sound like a dick when he can pick out something that happened 20 years ago, explain why it pissed him off, and then thank the person for doing it to him.

As far as ego is concerned, that's basketball. It is probably the most individualistic team game out there. A single player can and does win games. A great player must believe they are going to hit every shot they take so that they don't have any fear when taking that last shot. Jordan certainly recognized he wasn't perfect and used that as even more motivation:

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is precisely why I succeed. -Michael Jordan

And finally, how Jordan is acting during the lockout is completely expected. He was once a player, then an ex-player and now that he owns 80% of the Bobcats, he is an owner.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#133

Post by [deleted] »

shinratdr wrote: post #113
ighost wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think Steve Jobs, a man obsessed with his legacy, would authorize a hatchet job?

If you actually read the book, you would have caught the part where Steve Jobs never got to see or approve the final copy, on purpose. Steve Jobs was obsessed with his mainstream legacy, not the poorly informed opinions of a bunch of narrow-minded tech news enthusiasts. His mainstream legacy hasn't changed because of this book.

[deleted]

Re: Think different about Jobs

#134

Post by matwood »

bfrs wrote: post #3

---------------------------------------- From Malcolm Gladwell's "The real genius of Steve Jobs" [1]: Jobs, we learn, was a bully. "He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe". Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child…

If Jobs was really such an A-level asshole, I think he was goddamned lucky to have Steve Woz as his co-founder.

I don't get this attitude. Woz was just as goddamned lucky to have SJ as a business partner. From all accounts I've read, Woz was perfectly happy working/hacking around for whatever large company was good to work for at that time. It took SJ to see how much talent Woz had and then leverage that into a giant business success for both of them. Woz wasn't a salesman, business guy, or even a product guy. He was a hacker through and through. To make it big Woz needed someone like SJ as much as SJ needed a Woz.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#135

Post by maratd »

theshadow wrote: post #54
maratd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "bad" qualities are what made them effective. If they didn't have them, you would never have heard of them. Just be yourself. You don't really have a choice in the matter. You are you. You can only be you. If you try to graft aspects of somebody else's personality onto your own, you will find that it's a rather futile effort. You can't. Find out who you truly are, discover yourself, and then embrace yourself in t…

>>The "bad" qualities are what made them effective. If they didn't have them, you would never have heard of them. Please justify the above statement. How could you possibly know that? What is to say that these people would not have gone to achieve even greater heights if it had not been for their bad qualities? There is something incredibly depressing about this attitude that pretty much states that it's okay to be a…

> Please justify the above statement. How could you possibly know that?

Please provide an example of a single billionare or minor celebrity who isn't an asshole. The fact that you can't is evidence enough.

> There is something incredibly depressing about this attitude

What is really depressing is that you feel your life isn't worthwhile unless you are incredibly "successful" and you define success as being filthy rich or being a minor celebrity or really a clone of Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Larry Ellison/etc. I know myself. I know that I don't have the qualities necessary to be that and knowing that has relieved me of any desire to have that.

More than that, that single realization has allowed me to focus on the qualities I do possess! It has allowed me to become a more supportive leader. My team will never make the next google.com or iphone. That's ok. Instead, they'll have families and they'll spend time with them. They'll do amazing work! Just not on a scale that will earn me billions. That's fine by me!

Re: Think different about Jobs

#136

Post by matwood »

atdt wrote: post #15
jarcoal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly right. Companies do not get ahead by having mellow pushovers at the top. People having been talking a lot about how he stole all of the design credit from Ives. This might be the case, but I'm willing to bet you that Ives would be the first to admit that Jobs helped him unlock his true potential.

Taking credit for other people's creative work is a shit thing to do. Whatever benefits Ive may have drawn from the relationship aren't relevant. Daddy doesn't get to beat the kids just because daddy puts food on the table.

Taking credit for other people's creative work is a shit thing to do.

If SJ pushed Ives to iterate through 100s of designs, tweaked each one and then iterated again whose creative work would it be?

If SJ sat down and explained what he wanted in excruciating detail (given the stories of his attention to detail this is what I would expect), and through trial and error Ives arrived at what SJ wanted whose creative work would it be?

I think there is clearly no single creator in either case. Ives gets a lot of credit for being a great designer and being the one who helped SJ realize his computing vision. Given SJs OCD about details I don't think it was ever a case where he was playing golf, took an Ives design and just pushed it out as his own.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#137

Post by mikeash »

spacefungus wrote: post #47
junk2312313 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Assuming that his behavior was necessary to the quality of the product (an assumption neither Steve nor his biographer were willing to make)): He didn't "kill" them. He hurt their feelings. Weigh a few bruised egos versus hundreds of millions of people with delightful, time-saving devices. As the book points out, yes, there is a real and measurable cost to wasting people's time with a badly designed device. And ther…

That's a pretty clear way of looking it. The problem I have is that these attitudes are fragile. If you have a monarch, for example, with complete control over a country and who has tons of money and doesn't need to ask for permission, he can build a great nation of he's a good person. When he dies and his son, who's an asshole but equally determined and powerful, takes over, now you have a bad situation. Fortunately…

There are tons of behaviors which are great if you're right and bad if you're wrong. Should we never stand up for what we believe in? Should we let others decide things because we might be wrong?

And keep in mind that bad people won't care about these arguments. Only good people with reasonable and healthy self-doubt will be convinced to make less of an impact, and that's the opposite of what we should want.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#138

Post by purephase »

philwelch wrote: post #105
purephase wrote: post #28

First off, I say all this as a fan of both Isaacson and Jobs. I am convinced that this book is Jobs' attempt to counter worries that Apple is in trouble without him at the helm. Given that he was a perfectionist, that he would both commission, support and supposedly proof a work that paints him in the light that it does, there must be a motive to the caricature it paints. Think about it. Everyone is worried about the…

I wouldn't say I "idolize" Jobs after reading the biography, but I still consider him a hero. His arrogance and narcissism is justified in the end; an inflated self-image is unbecoming in someone mediocre, but Jobs really was a special and important person. Still, Jobs never seemed outright grandiose, as he often acknowledged his own flaws and appreciated people who stood up for him. His other flaws, while he could c…

I agree! I think the book portrays him unfairly. I think Isaacson fudges a few facts here and there which to someone unfamiliar with Apple and the early days of modern personal computing, really puts Jobs in a poor light.

My point was more about why Jobs allowed the book to portray him like that. I have a hard time believing that there is no motivation behind it.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#139

Post by ScottBurson »

ryan-allen wrote: post #58
spacefungus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the Foxconn suicide casualties didn't just have hurt feelings.

Suicide rates in populations around the world is much higher than you think. [1] The media don't report on them generally (if they did, there'd be more stories about them than horrific car crashes that the news outlets report on). Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year.…

Downvoted. I was with you (and had upvoted your earlier posts) until the last sentence.

Re: Think different about Jobs

#140

Post by powertower »

imathrowaway123 wrote: post #128
ryan-allen wrote: post #9

While you can point at how he conducted himself at Apple and scream "Monster!", what isn't mentioned in this post but is dealt with at length in his biography is how he conducted himself at Pixar. He was much more low-key about the 'products' at Pixar, he mostly was an enabler and negotiator for them. In Pixar's early days he invested an awful lot of his then-fortune into keeping it alive, and it was his cunning nego…

Hear hear. You make a point that is true as the day is long - one which nobody wants to hear. Not long ago I became a boss and tried to be a textbook good one: paying generously, being generous in general (e.g. vacation/sick days on the honor system), being a real sweetheart, asking nicely, giving credit, supporting their initiatives, giving control… My employees were smart, capable, and hard-working, so I should tru…

You should give a good instance / concrete example of what your previous employees did that demonstrates your provided view...

1. It entertains us even more!

2. Half the time it turns out the problem is really with the person talking (there is a reality distortion field turned on).

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