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The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

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71–80 of 108 posts

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#71
post #57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the American conquer, might is right arguement. No wonder your country ranks pretty high on the misery scale... There's more to life than "dominating" industries. Edit: I should qualify this a bit more. If it does make you happy to basically have no life outside of a career, then go for it. Everyone's happiness is something only they can answer for themselves. Some people can tolerate being lonely, and I'm pretty…

As a Canadian, I can say that Americans have more fun in life than just about anyone. Sure, we canucks and the rest of the world like to call them out on their shortcomings all the time, but they brought us disneyland and superman, etc.

You forget that Superman was an American-Canadian co-creation.

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#72
post #3

I have read Steve Jobs biography and this is definitively a cautionary tale and a great warning for anybody, but for other reasons that stated in this article. I am no Apple fan, as a matter of fact I don't like the look and feel of their product but I gained a great admiration for Steve Jobs because he seemed like a man in immense suffering. I'm not talking about the obvious physical pain of cancer and all his crazy…

> But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense [...] I was just thinking this. I'm sure Jobs hated Rand, given his politics, but he sounds an awful lot like Hank Rearden in TFA.

As a Buddhist maybe not. Buddhism and Enlightenment Era ideology are both anchored in the idea of the "self". There's a great synergy between the two. To get what I mean look at the former CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. The staunchest of Libertarians, a legitimate Buddhist, and a pioneer of "Core Values" Branding( e.g Apple ).

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#73
post #32

Wasn't he a buddhist? Not that that means anything. Buddhist's are more then capable of being shit-heads. But if he was a practicing buddhist.. wouldn't he had recognized what leads to suffering? Desire of course. Desire to be be perfect. Or maybe his desire to prove he was right? There are other words I'd use to describe him (and several other corporate giants); arrogance comes to mind. Sometimes these men think the…

Self-made man doesn't mean nobody did anything for you. If an olympic athlete wins a race, he didn't build the stadium, didn't sew his uniforms and shoes, didn't grow and squeeze his morning juice drink with his own hands, didn't build the car he used to get to the stadium and didn't personally extract the oil and made it into the gasoline to power his vehicle. All these things are done by other people. That does not mean these other people share the success of the olympic athlete and should get gold medals too, even though if he had no shoes, no clothes, no food, no car and no gasoline, he probably couldn't win the even he won.

There's a thing called separation of labor. It is one of the biggest advantage of civilization, one of the biggest thing separating people from most of the animals (some animals have primitive separation of labor, but most do not). It allows people to be much more prosperous and successful by offloading many tasks to other people and gaining enormous specialization and scale advantages. We - as the human race - literally could not exist in the current form without it.

However the existence of the separation of labor does not mean that we owe fruits of our labor to every other person on the planet, even if for many of those it is possible to trace their part to something you used to produce these fruits. People invented money for exactly this reason - if you want a car, you pay money for a car, and since that moment you do not owe anything to the car maker. The car is yours, and if you drive it to work that makes you a billionaire - it's your billion, not car maker's. If you hire somebody, you pay them money. If somebody cooked a meal for you and you became a billionaire, you owe him a decent cook's salary, but you do not owe him your success.

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#74
The outline of his personality should be quite familiar to anyone who has worked with a famous (or even semi-famous, or just in their own mind) creative person in a field such as music, fashion, movies, TV, publishing, or high-end food. It's the classic prima donna genius-in-pain trope.

I suppose it's just somewhat rare in tech, where you more often see the Brian Wilson, asperger type of personality -- the introverted genius-in-a-thick-shell.

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#75
post #12

One of the things that struck me while reading Jobs' biography was how frequently he cried. Numerous times throughout he's described as weeping, sometimes at momentous occasions, like getting fired from Apple, and sometimes over relatively trivial matters. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a grown person cry about something at work? Ever? I think one of the things that made Steve Steve, and made him capa…

Think about the last time anyone has done any work for you. Was there anything that was off? Probably there was. Most people weigh the benefit of fixing whatever minor problem there might be against the hassle of explaining what's wrong and waiting for it to be redone and the possibility of insulting the person who did the work and decide it's not worth it. You probably do this without even thinking about it. Obviously, for Steve it was always worth it, and that probably had a lot do with how emotionally sensitive he was.

Was it Steve Jobs himself who put in the time and made the extra effort to see that something was Just So, or was it the person Jobs ordered to put in the extra time and make the extra effort?

There's a world of difference between doing the work yourself and to keep doing it until it's exactly right, and demanding that other people make sure that what they do is done exactly right.

The important thing to take away was how much he was able to achieve because he cared so deeply, not the tyrannical aspect.

It seems more like he was able to get others to achieve so much because of the tyrannical aspect.

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#77
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense [...] I was just thinking this. I'm sure Jobs hated Rand, given his politics, but he sounds an awful lot like Hank Rearden in TFA.

As a Buddhist maybe not. Buddhism and Enlightenment Era ideology are both anchored in the idea of the "self". There's a great synergy between the two. To get what I mean look at the former CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey. The staunchest of Libertarians, a legitimate Buddhist, and a pioneer of "Core Values" Branding( e.g Apple ).

While it may be the case that many Western Buddhists have found a way to merge Buddhism and selfishness, I'm pretty sure that this is a modern and specifically Western distortion of Buddhist teachings. At least I haven't found anything like that in the Buddhist sutras I've read. On the contrary, to the extent that the self appears there at all, it is to be effaced.

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#78
post #32

Wasn't he a buddhist? Not that that means anything. Buddhist's are more then capable of being shit-heads. But if he was a practicing buddhist.. wouldn't he had recognized what leads to suffering? Desire of course. Desire to be be perfect. Or maybe his desire to prove he was right? There are other words I'd use to describe him (and several other corporate giants); arrogance comes to mind. Sometimes these men think the…

I'm also believe in karma. And the way he died,, his long battle/suffering - leads me to believe he had debts to pay.

No human has the right to judge any other human this way. Since you believe in karma, hadn't you better stop?

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#79

This article is Bullshit. It is heights of insanity that a no name wired writer can just assume himself to be qualified to make judgements on someone who has had a huge impact (positive) on the world. I use an iPhone, iPad and a mac and I can vouch that my life is better with them than what I would imagine it to be without them. And what is the accusation? that he bullied a few? for making hundreds of millions of liv…

You sound mad.

Re: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

#80
post #3

I have read Steve Jobs biography and this is definitively a cautionary tale and a great warning for anybody, but for other reasons that stated in this article. I am no Apple fan, as a matter of fact I don't like the look and feel of their product but I gained a great admiration for Steve Jobs because he seemed like a man in immense suffering. I'm not talking about the obvious physical pain of cancer and all his crazy…

> But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense [...] I was just thinking this. I'm sure Jobs hated Rand, given his politics, but he sounds an awful lot like Hank Rearden in TFA.

According to the Woz, Atlas Shrugged influenced Steve:

http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/How-influential-was-Atlas-Sh...

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