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Comment by M_Grey | Hacker News Reader

He won the sociopath lottery; he was able to take enormous risks because they didn't particularly faze him. Most people who do that fail horribly, but if you work backwards from a list of highly successful people, you may find that pattern of behavior occasionally bears fruit. The same is true of playing the lottery, but it would be wrong to assume that the secret to success is to play it.

Truly, for a bunch of very smart people, you'd think the tech community would be more aware of the dangers of working backwards from a pool of successful people, hoping to find a magic ingredient. Work from the broad population forward, not from the narrow population, back.

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Almost every business book and online article about how $BUSINESS or $ENTREPRENEUR became successful does this. It's infuriating. "Let's wait to see which of the 7 billion people on the planet become billionaires, and then look back and see what they did, ignoring all those who did similar things and did not become billionaires." Totally flawed, yet the public eats it up like candy.

Go read Good To Great and prepare to barf. Business schools adore this book. Look at the description on Jim Collins's web site [1]: "Start with 1,435 good companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that became great. Now here's how you can do it too." That's literally Survivorship Bias.

1: http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-gr...

A great book on this is "The Halo Effect". It specifically calls out "Good to Great" as an example of really poorly done research that does nothing but call out coincidences.

The one part I loved about the book is when it provides tips on how to identify these "empty" claims. Things like "we spent 3 years putting this analysis together!", which does nothing to support their claims, but just creates the impression that "wow! this must be true!".

https://www.amazon.com/Halo-Effect-Business-Delusions-Manage...

I wish identifying crap was a more widespread skill. I think if I ever became a millionaire (doubtless by reading business self-help books), I'd "give back" by volunteering at a High School to teach kids skepticism and bullshit detection.

No sir, you must give back today, every day, whenever you get a chance. A tree does not dream about a time when it is a certain size, at which point it will bear fruit. It simply bears whatever fruit it has, when it has it.

That is a great quote! Thanks for sharing.

I like this enough to re-use it... Are you quoting something I can cite, or did that spawn from your own gray matter?

Best as I can determine, this is original writing. I like it very much.

gray matter... and the spaces in between :)

Are you suggesting that high-school students wouldn't take an unknown lecturer seriously if they aren't a millionaire ? And that being a millionaire somehow implies you are authoritative on topics of logic and reason ?

Or are you saying that without a million dollars you can't afford to "give back" an occasional one-hour lecture on skepticism ? That seems ironic.

Edits: rant

Read that as, "When I can afford to not work..."

If you're serious about teaching I can highly recommend trying to do it even if you're busy with work. I've been actively (or as actively as possible) coaching people who wanted to go into web development and it's played a big role in making me a happier person. One of them recently got a job as a developer and knowing I played a role in that made me happy in a way that few things do. I can highly recommend it!

>I wish identifying crap was a more widespread skill. I think if I ever became a millionaire (doubtless by >>selling<< business self-help books), I'd "give back" by volunteering at a High School to teach kids skepticism and bullshit detection.

It's called a History degree.

And yet Carly Fiorina has an MA in History, and look at what she did to Hewlett Packard.

Since when do degrees imply knowledge? Most degrees are only tangentially related to actual education.

Judging by her campaign and how she ran HP, I don't see a sign she's critically open in the way you need to learn from history.

Personally, I'd say knowledge of history is a very, very thin bullshit detector. It simply allows you to see more patterns; not how to evaluate them when they compose.

Reminds me of a simple stock scam:

1. Send e-mails to a bunch of people claiming to have a great stock pick. Tell half of them to buy and half to sell short.

2. Wait a week. If the stock went up, do the same thing but send your new pick only to the half that got your buy recommendation, and if it went down, send it to the other half. Anyone who saw your incorrect prediction never hears from you again.

3. Repeat a couple more times.

4. Now ask the people on your list to pay you to continue getting your stock picks -- after all, at least as far as they've seen, you've been 100% right on every pick you made.

Yes, this scam is live and well in the sports betting world. There is even a CNBC reality TV show called "Money Talks" that documents and encourages this; as documented by the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xiiv-s-DRs http://www.vipsportslasvegas.com/

The recipe is:

1. Cold call people on a lead sheet for people indicate interest on placing bets on sports games.

2. Sell interested folks with a "two week package" for $250; seems pricey, but the name of the game is to filter out the minnows catch gullible whales. You want folks who are "vested" on this and prove they have the cash to be scammed. Double-side your bets or smarter yet, side your bets by the probability implied by the Vegas oddsmakers (50% Team One Wins, 50% Team Two Wins or 70% Team One Wins, 30% Team two if spread is that way).

3. After a couple of weeks pass, call up the people who have won 4 or 5 games in a row, inevitable happenstance by sheer probability. Upsell them on a "weekend Vegas package" where they can gamble on higher stakes preferably $50K-$75K; because you're seem now as a infallible genius by the marks, you charge them a 35%-50% commission on their wins.

4. Doesn't matter if your client wins or lose. Take home the 50% commission on their churn and move onto the next one. Rinse and repeat.

The show is highly entertaining and enlightening not because of the extreme doucheness of the head scammer and his salesmen, but the marks who delude themselves as they lose game after game and gets scammed - all followed by the camera-men of CNBC and the spin-motivational commentary of the scammers.

Fascinating that this scam was exposed on the Simpsons in 2005 and people still fall for it.

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Professor_Pigskin

Derren Brown made an entertaining episode on this scam: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1173484/

But how did the final bet work?!

It didn't, the final participant lost in the final bet.

Everyone wants to be successful, and no one wants to believe that it's not something they could control if they just knew the "secret". Add that to the fact that no one ever sold a self-help book entitled, "Getting Lucky", and it starts to make sense how we've arrived at this point.

Great link by the way.

We've all done that exercise in school where the professor tells everyone ahead of time to bring a coin to class. Then he has everyone stand up and flip a coin. Everyone who flips tails sits down. Those remaining standing flip it again, those flipping tails sit down, repeat until there is one person standing.

Then interview that last person and ask her what her technique was, how could she possibly flip heads 6 times in a row? What hard work and practice did she do ahead of time to make her such a good coin flipper? What daily habits produced this proficiency? This is essentially what we do when we try to be successful simply by asking successful people what they did.

I was the winner of that in my class. They asked me how I won, and I said, "eh, it's nothing." 13 years ago, with no brain, head, arms, or legs, I beat out several million peers to fertilize The Egg. This is just the afterglow of that awesomeness.

A lot of those millions of peers actually play support roles so that the speedsters like you can make it to the egg (especially before any rival mates sperm makes it there).

Just thought I'd point that out given how there are some parallels to how many people play support roles within society while only a few make it to the pinnacle. Yet we still say that those at the pinnacle 'beat' all their peers.

Of course the person who chose to not flip their coin at all...didn't end up being the person to flip the most heads in a row.

So the truth lies somewhere between "it's entirely chance" and "it's entirely hard work/intelligence/participation".

Or, in my case in that school exercise: "I cheated." And so did the other finalist. But he was a known scoundrel, and I was the 'nice kid.' The last coin flip was the only one that was monitored. I won, and it was hailed and a just result. So, it's not all luck.

The problem is that no one is reading Steve Jobs' memoirs to find out that the secret to winning, is that you have to play... they want some secret to win the game.

>We've all done that exercise in school

Ha! I have not, but that's a great exercise. I'd be interested in hearing the "winner's" responses to the questions.

If we had all done that exercise in school, more people would be better at managing their money. This analogy only works if "success" or whatever is a random walk (like I believe picking stocks is).

Yea, totally relevant exercise when you want to explain to students the phenomenon of the "superstar mutual fund manager".

Yep. Logically speaking, what is the probability of billionaire regaining his wealth if he's stripped off his fortune and contacts? 0.000000001 (almost like the rest of us).

Haven't seen that but wish I had, that's an awesome exercise.

Well, not for nothing but it's a GREAT title for a self-help book :> Getting Lucky - Embracing the randomness of luck for a definite success.

Many self help books try to make you think about luck as setting yourself up to take advantage of opportunities that show up frequently around you, but you might not normally notice them, or be prepared to act on them.

I can't think of any specific citations, since it's such a general observation.

Richard Wiseman of 59 Seconds face actually has a book called "The Luck Factor".

One case study is a woman who wins lots of newspaper contests - the point being that she wins lots because she puts in for lots.

Another point is perspective. You fall and break your arm. You can either perceive it as bad luck, you broke your arm, or as good luck since it could have been your neck.

I think there are plenty of books available on getting lucky. :)

That's not necessarily survivorship bias. Survivorship bias would be "Here's 10 successful companies, do what they do". If you analyze a pool of random companies and then consider what the successful companies do differently then that would be decent scientific method (though you should form hypotheses first, really).

For example, if "risk-takers" both sometimes do very well and also often fail then you expect to capture the failed risk-takers in your initial sample, so you're not just biased by the successful risk-takers (said survivorship bias).

I'm not familiar with the book, but the snippet you reference describes something much closer to proper scientific method than most of the examples of this phenomena.

You have to identify something specific and then look at that specific factor across the entire population of companies.

If you survey all CEO's of the Fortune 500 you might find that they are all workaholics. Do you conclude that being a workaholic will make you a CEO? Of course not. Did you look at how many workaholics there are that don't become CEO? That is survivorship bias.

You also need to look at cause and effect. Is it that you must be a workaholic to become CEO? Or is it that as you climb the ladder you end up working hard and harder because that is a requirement of each position. Maybe being a workaholic is an effect of climbing high.

No, you can't just analyze the 11 successful companies. You need to consider multiple variables, then see if they correlate with success over the entire population.

It's perfectly possible some traits of all 11 successful companies are also shared by most of the unsuccessful ones, too.

I always the ask the questions why doesn't the writer become a billionaire if he knows how to? Why doesn't the psychic win the lottery?

well, I have to admit, most people who tell you online about how to become rich, are, in fact, rich.

But they still fail to find out about what made them rich in the first place.

For example, there is a German real estate millionair, who does online courses to tell people how he got so rich.

He talks hours of hours about how he learned the right trade and how he invested his money in flats he bought and improved etc.

In his first lessen he talks a bit about his past and says "The only thing you got to do is to buy a flat and get someone to rent it! I did it like this, I simply put in 50k€ of insurance money I got from an accident."

The whole thing is done with this. I mean he literally told the audience "You simply need 50k to get rich!"

Buying real estate and renting it out might actually be the most reliable way to build wealth. You need to be in a market with steady growth, which is true of many desirable cities. You need some starting capital, which most people could earn through a few years of steady work and frugal living (probably have to hold off on having a family unless you have high income).

It's not a "get rich quick" scheme by any means, though, and managing properties is still work. I know more than one retiree who has built up 8-figure wealth this way. Of course, it took them a lifetime.

Most people who tell you online how to get rich got rich by scamming people into buying their "Insider tips on how to get rich for the life you deserve" content.

For someone with a talent for online marketing, it's almost the easiest money there is.

Right - and the wider context is that he started doing this at a time when banks flooded the world with credit and lots of other factors saw huge land price inflation.

You get this in the UK all the time, property shows where people "do up" a dilapidated property over 6 months, then relist it. And guess what? It's gone up! It's gone up by labour cost + materials + background land price inflation. But they see it as a wise "investment".

> guess what? It's gone up! It's gone up by labour cost + materials + background land price inflation. But they see it as a wise "investment".

If you put your own capital and work into something, and its value increases... that's what an investment is.

No they are adding zero value, they are riding off the corrupt system and taking labour from others.

Also in most casts they are not putting capital in, they are borrowing from a bank who create the debt. They are little more than outsourced debt collectors.

You specifically state that they are adding value. Going up by labor and materials means value has been added.

Yes but my main point is that the primary gain was on the land due to govt policy. These people are typically amateurs who basically paint a wall. Unskilled labour plus a few $K in materials == not much. Yet the gains are significant.

While I agree with the sentiment, part of me wonders if this isn't this the same as asking why the top NFL coach doesn't make all the touchdowns himself?

Often they used to, or at least, played the game at a high level. In other cases the answer is that they lacked the physical ability. There is no such barrier to making money.

Well you could say there's an intelligence (Social/emotional/IQ) barrier to making lots of money. Those with the growth mindset will say that there's nothing innate about intelligence and it's pure effort, but I'm not completely sold on that.

Devil's advocate: if you find a trait common to all the survivors, which those who died did not have, then you have found something that might be necessary to survive that far (though it may not be sufficient). Some organisms possess immunity to certain pathogens.

Of course you can't just expect to follow Pixar's bets (or Apple's, or Google's, or ...) and expect to win big. But understanding the way they played is important, if you're playing the game too.

(As you touch on too, tempering the natural tendency to give credit for success rather than chalking it up to chance is also important. But I can't believe that Jobs' success is survivorship bias alone.)

Sure, if you find a trait common to survivors that those who died did not have--but to do that, you have to look at those who died, too.

Agree.

This is similar to $BIGCOMPANY passed on $BIGIDEA see how they sucked and passed up a great opportunity!

Without knowing the thousands of other ideas that they passed on that never made it anywhere.

A small example is perhaps HP not taking Wozniak seriously. (Also assumes the presentation and pitch was done right and all of that...)

This SMBC comic makes the same point on survivorship bias. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/path-of-a-hero

That isn't a very good synopsis. In all his books, he compares a "great" company to its closest, best competitor and look at what they do differently across many industries. That is pretty interesting and can give clues on what makes a company successful. I don't remember ever reading "do these specific things and your company will become successful guaranteed" in his books. I agree most business books are like that, but Jim Collins books are not.

See also "Outliers".

My take on it is that people really really want to believe there isn't a measure of luck there.

<spoiler>That book lost me when it started going on about how the executives of Marlboro were great because they were so passionate about their 'mission' vs. other tobacco companies.</spoiler>

The book was not totally useless but the above moment caused me to lose interest very rapidly.

I just wanted to point out that business schools DO NOT adore this book or really any popular business book. I spent my early career reading a huge number of popular business books (like Good to Great) and was somewhat shocked when during my MBA program we didn't read, care about or otherwise mention them at all.

Since when is having an opinion a bad thing? If we all delayed putting out theories (like Good to Great does in explaining commonalities of companies that made it huge) until all existing theories like Survivorship Bias were covered then no new theories put out.

Survivorship Bias has a place but it is not the be-all-end-all.

These aren't theories... they aren't even hypotheses. I would even argue that they fail the low standards of the "WAG".

How's that survivalship bias? It's taking X companies, looking forward Y years, and then contrasting the qualities of the successful ones to the rest. But, the sample doesn't change midstream, does it? (not familiar with the book, but the quote implies that)

No, what he's doing is taking X successful companies (and X' similar but unsuccessful companies), looking BACK for Y years, and looking at the Z things that the X companies did differently than the X' companies, attributing a causal relationship between those activities and success. The flaw, of course, is he ignores other companies that ALSO did Z but were not successful.

another book by Jim is "Built to last". In the "startup" frenzy, it is difficult to focus on things which matter. We are hammered with news and the general knowledge that it takes a brilliant person a great idea to start the next Google.

In Built to last, they have compared what great companies had done different from their companion companies which went defunct. Of course, it neglects few aspects like luck, but it does explain a lot of things which are notably absent from folklore of "create a great app, disrupt a market and go count the number of 0's in your bank account", except that it rarely happens like this!

> He won the sociopath lottery; he was able to take enormous risks because they didn't particularly faze him.

I'm not so sure about that. Having been around during the period when he was canned from Apple, founded NeXT/Pixar, and subsequently came back to Apple Jobs had changed considerably.

I think that (and he has stated) that getting canned from Apple was a bit piece of humble pie for him, that he was lost and had to do a lot of self-examination before he picked himself up and founded new companies.

Acknowledging his weaknesses and mistakes doesn't strike me as sociopathic, or as being an unfazed man. What he shared with the public regarding his personal struggles is a whole different story. He was never particularly public, especially after the Great Firing.

Your other points regarding survivorship bias are point on.

> I'm not so sure about that. Having been around during the period when he was canned from Apple, founded NeXT/Pixar, and subsequently came back to Apple Jobs had changed considerably.

This is what makes me most sad about Isaacson's biography. He left out the one period that I was most interested in. The time at NeXT, combined with the developments in his 'family situation' seemed to have really changed him for the better (or at least better at running a company). I was so curious about that, and instead I got stuff I mostly knew about and too-frequent descriptions of Jobs' tantrums/meltdowns. Such a shame.

(btw, if anyone can recommend material on this period of his life, I'd love to know!)

He left Apple as a loose canon, a renegade who kept sabotaging his own projects, often losing touch with reality.

NeXT brought him back to Earth, both in terms of being able to produce a product people wanted, and in terms of managing a team without being a total tyrant. It wasn't a smooth progression, NeXT did start out pretty out-there, but in the end it was more pragmatic. OpenSTEP and other efforts demonstrated that.

The Isaacson biography isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's utter garbage. I can't believe someone has that level of access and churns out a book that's basically the Cliff's Notes version of all other books about Jobs already published.

Becoming Steve Jobs is more focussed on that period: https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Steve-Jobs-Evolution-Visiona...

Awesome! Thanks for the recommendation.

>(btw, if anyone can recommend material on this period of his life, I'd love to know!)

I recommend you this book to read. https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Steve-Jobs-Evolution-Visiona...

I was also hoping for more insights in this period. Perhaps one of the other biographies done on him has this?

That term "sociopath" gets thrown around a lot, but it's so far off base, real sociopaths are starting to feel sorry for Steve Jobs.

As revealed recently, he denied Tim Cook's offer of a partial liver transplant. Something that can only be explained with empathy, a lack of which is the primary indication of what's called "sociopathy".

To name just a few more of the signs of sociopath that Steve Jobs didn't fit: inability to plan ahead, lower intelligence, delinquency, violence, financial irresponsibility,...

Basically, what people mean is "he could, at times, be a bit of an asshole". I'm not even sure about your assertion about risk-taking because I can't think of any events that deviate significantly from the risk-taking of similar companies.

It's also hard to say how much his "being an asshole" contributed to Apple's success. Getting people to work 80+ may be a strategy to lower costs, but I don't see how it helps, for example, with the iPhone, created at a time where money wasn't the limiting factor at Apple.

He chose homeopathic remedies when first diagnosed with cancer rather than the known and proven effective treatments.

By the time he realized it wasn't a joke the effective treatments were too late.

He used his wealth and influence to get on organ transplant lists in numerous states. At the time doctors were publicly confused because the organ could no longer save his life, only extend it. This action likely cost another person their life.

With his final days he designed and built a super-expensive yacht...

Steve Jobs may not have been sociopathic but he wasn't someone that cared about the well-being of others. He was the first member in the cult of his own ego.

> He chose homeopathic remedies when first diagnosed with cancer rather than the known and proven effective treatments.

That strikes me as stupid / naïve more than sociopathic.

> He used his wealth and influence to get on organ transplant lists in numerous states. At the time doctors were publicly confused because the organ could no longer save his life, only extend it. This action likely cost another person their life.

That's selfish, true, but I could see myself doing something similar when faced with the fear of death. It's human. Not admirable, but human.

> Steve Jobs may not have been sociopathic but he wasn't someone that cared about the well-being of others. He was the first member in the cult of his own ego.

I'm not sure he was introspective enough to be a member of the cult of his own ego, but yeah, he wasn't a nice man. No argument there.

> I'm not sure he was introspective enough to be a member of the cult of his own ego

I'm not sure that I agree. I think he was very introspective but, because of being put for adoption and other traumatic experiences in his childhood, he focused on things that are atypical (hence the accusations of sociopathy).

You know that he was neither stupid, nor naive... so... what's your next best guess on that one?

Smart people can do stupid things.

I feel like that's Silicon Valley's motto at times.

As do I...

Denying his own child was his is way up there too

I forgot about that one. It just makes me feel bad for his daughter.

As someone with two kids, it makes me feel sorry for him too. The early years are a lot to miss out on.

good lord, just because the man did some selfish things does NOT mean he didn't care "about the well-being of others".

> inability to plan ahead, lower intelligence, delinquency, violence, financial irresponsibility

These are not traits of (all) sociopaths. A highly functional sociopath could be defined as:

"People with sociopath traits that also happen to have a very high intelligence quotient. They are likely to be highly successful in the field they endeavor (politics, business, etc.). They plan very meticulously and the presence of sociopathic traits like lack of empathy, lack of remorse, deceptiveness, shallow emotions, etc. makes it very difficult for "normal" people to compete with them."

That self destructive lack of forethought though was clearly there for him, as evinced by his avoidable death.

If anything, and if we're doing arm-chair psychoanalysis, narcissism (in the clinical/professional sense) seems more applicable.

To be fair though, Steve basically did it three times, once with Pixar, once with apple computers, and a third time with rejuvenating apple with mobile tech like the ipod and ipad. There has got to be something to it when someone can pull it off repeatedly. I remember Ellison once called it an experiment, you tried Apple without Steve and it failed, you brought Steve back and watched it succeed, that combined with the success of pixar suggests that Steve is either doing something right or he was chosen as tech emissary by God.

> There has got to be something to it when someone can pull it off repeatedly

Not necessarily - after all, there was a man who was struck by lightning 7 times[1] through no effort on his part. You will never hear about the almost-Jobs who fail to succeed on their subsequent come-back attempts.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan

But using the coin flip analogy, I would say that each successful company requires hundreds of "coin flips", with the outcome "heads" a majority of the time. A few bad flips could sink a company. I think it's much more than getting lucky 3 times -- more like mostly "lucky" hundreds of times.

He failed hard with NeXT. 3 out of 4 ain't bad I guess.

Well, except that NeXT bought apple.

(Look at the board/exec composition pre/post acquisition)

Failed hard by selling a company for a couple hundred million?

Over 400 invested. Ask Ross Perot about the success of NeXT.

There's the business end of things; Ross Perot himself "only" invested $20 million and got just shy of $70 million out of it when it was finally sold.

Total failure. If you squint hard enough with VC eyes, they can almost convince you that $70 million is a terrible amount of money.

And then ask Apple where OS X comes from. Ask any iOS developer about Objective-C (though not invented by NeXT, it certainly helped popularize it). Ask the wider world about object oriented programming.

If you can see past the bottom of the balance sheet and beyond the next quarter, NeXT lives on, despite not achieving commercial success.

Actually - much more:

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_me...

Apple paid $429 million in cash, which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares, which went to Steve Jobs, who was deliberately not given cash for his part in the deal.

---

> Steve basically did it three times

Yes but the 2nd time he had the advantage of having the first success. That would mean he was taken more seriously and would be able to hire and influence better than if he was not famous. And of course in the current culture having even a large failure is enough to put you on the map to get more attention for the 2nd time around. This is not the way business used to be by the way. Used to be if you failed you failed and nobody would touch you with a ten foot pole.

I hate how you're getting static for this. In my personal life I became a lot more successful when I stopped giving a shit about other people as much. I now have a much more fluid morality without being a "bad guy." There's something to be said about how society teaches us to be team players and to not be the squeaky wheel, yet its the non-team players and the squeakers who often win out in life.

I think its okay to be sociopath-lite. I believe guys like Jobs were like this. I don't think he remotely was a full blown sociopath. He genuinely cared about the experience of his users. I also this we downplay the sociopathic tendancies of techies who may be on the autism spectrum like Woz. Woz is brilliant, but I don't think he could relate with non-techies. I don't think he ever really understood the benefits of usability while at Apple. He was all about code and hardware and gave no shits about grandmas who didn't want to learn basic or type in archaic commands. Jobs on the other hand cared about usability, but also gave no shits about people in his way.

I think there's a wonderful, dare I say, synergy between aspie indifference and leadership sociopathy. They're 80% on the same page and compatible personalities who can work together, but that last 20% is different and focuses on different but important problem domains. Gates/Ballmer is another good example. Or Jobs/Hertzfeld during the Mac years. Or Newell/Lynch at Valve. Or Page-Brin/Schmidt.

Thank you. Survivorship bias. I sound like a drone when I talk about this in my social circles. Either I do a poor job explaining this or some people are just never going to be able to wrap their heads around this. This and the 'if I only had a good idea I'd be a successful startup' meme are two peeves I try and argue against in vain..

Like many biases Hindsight/Survivorship really really feels right to many people, especially if they're not terribly aware of logical and cognitive biases. By contrast what you're saying to them requires them to think in a new way, and maybe let go of some deeply held beliefs.

Besides, who wants to believe that we know so much less than we like to pretend, and in fact the books they might have read and loved are just... bull?

Yeah, Steve spent much of his Apple fortune on NeXT and Pixar. Both could have easily failed.

So Jobs was a billionaire in 1995. I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft hadn't invested $150 million in Apple in 1997?

NeXT did fail by most standards. It didn't turn profit and went out of business after a generation or so of products that failed to penetrate the market.

They ended up being the foundation of OS X and the box on which the web was invented. Even if NeXT failed as a company they're still a historic milestone.

NeXT was cheaper than BeOS, wasn't that a key thing?

Apple paid $429 million for NeXT. Be was offered $125 million but wanted $300 million.

if you've ever coded for iOS, the NS in all those objects and methods? it stands for NeXTStep

NeXT was bought by Apple for $400 million dollars and today NeXTStep is running on a billion Apple devices.

As some wag put it, NeXT bought Apple for $-400 million dollars.

(Assuming that's the figure, I don't remember myself.)

Without jobs, would it stilll happen?

No. Apple was completely lost before Jobs returned.

The hardware was a marketing mess, and the software was stuck in R&D hell with no prospect of escape.

There were some interesting ideas, but execution and management were all over the place.

I don't think Jobs is an example of survivor bias. I think Jobs was an extremely talented marketer with an unusual aesthetic sense.

Sociopaths are more likely to kill their companies than make them grow. They love drama, abuse, and terror for their own sake.

Jobs was more of a narcissist. He lacked empathy, but he wasn't constantly trying to destroy other people because he enjoyed it.

It was more that he knew what he wanted - his own vision of himself as a guru of consumer technology, aesthetics, and creativity - and he didn't care what it cost to get it.

Personal and business relationships were all disposable. The vision wasn't.

Unknown, but it's overstated how much of that $150 million cash injection actually helped.

It's more likely the undisclosed sum (well higher) that kept Apple from the brink of bankruptcy.

"I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft hadn't invested $150 million in Apple in 1997?"

But this was't completely luck. It was negotiated by Jobs.

They also provided office/IE for Mac at a time when that was really important.

I have the same 'issue' with other professions. Before the tech-industry was big, you had the occasional CEO saying: "I started in the mailroom!", implying that you too can be a CEO one day. That's reversed reasoning gone wrong: the chance that a CEO worked in the mailroom is a million times bigger than that a mailroom employee is bound to be a CEO.

Same holds for famous artists: talk to their parents and they probably say that he/she was always singing with a fake microphone in front of a mirror. 90% of the kids do that...

20 years ago, my grandfather kept telling me that if I wanted to "get into computers" I should get a job as a cleaner, because if I worked hard as a cleaner the boss would notice me and promote me.

Didn't listen when I told him that cleaning was all contracted out and the "boss" would never see me working hard as a cleaner.

If you are in silicon valley you can sample from everyone that took a seed round or everyone that quit their job to work full-time on a startup.

In my sample of people I know or know of, the people who took risks created more wealth.

If you don't play, you can't win, but that's such a basic, entry-level observation that it can't sell books or seminars. People don't want to know the obvious, that if you don't try you can't succeed, they want to know how to select for success.

I'm not sure about that.

The choice is between getting a seed round and going and working at Google making 200k entry level in total comp.

I doubt many startup founders beat "just go and work for Google full time"

I agree and LOL to "Sociopath Lottery" ... well said. I think using Jobs name in this article is kind of clickbait'ish... the real story here is a dedicated group of talented people with a loving culture made something amazing. Steve didn't do that, he funded that.

I think most people realize that there is no secret to success. However it is useful to occasionally ask the question. A successful person might say this is how _I_ did it. Two people are not the same and their situations are not identical but sometimes its worth narrowing the gap so that you have less variables. Certainly luck plays a huge role and most people recognize this, but then again trying to emulate (non shitty) aspects of someone's personality/habits/environment is very common, even in the tech industry. "Which editor do you use", "What is your vim config", "Which laptop does Linus Torvalds use", "What music does X listen to while coding", etc etc.

I don't think you can attribute his success to luck. Yes he did take risk and yes he was a sociopath in that he didn't care much about how much he had to emotionally torment others to get what he wanted. However if you want to compare what he did to winning the lottery, it would be like he bought lottery tickets and then flew down to the loterry operator and did everything he could to fix the game so that he would win. just like how Warren buffet bought over companies and then made sure they run it his way.

There was luck in being in the right place at the right time, and in meeting Wozniak.

Sure but lots of other people had that luck too. I mean, they all went to computer club meetings and spoke openly about what they were working on. How many other people at those club meetings founded transformational computer companies that survive today, let alone as one of the most valuable companies in the world?

Even within Apple there are stories of guys like Mike Scott, who was the 2nd CEO and took Apple public. He was there at the beginning, got super rich, but what was his long-term impact [1]? Have you ever even heard of him, outside of a Steve Jobs bio?

[1] He has arguably had a longer-term impact on the mineralogy of gems than in computing.

It's not pure luck. It's not pure talent/drive/etc. It's the mixture of the two.

And yes, I had heard of Mike Scott, but I'm an old geek who's a Bay Area native.

> It's not pure luck. It's not pure talent/drive/etc. It's the mixture of the two.

I agree with that. I interpreted your comment above as over-emphasizing luck; perhaps a misinterpretation.

A lot of other people met Woz too. HP turned Woz's idea down. I think it was Woz's luck he met Jobs.

Working backwards or forwards, the result is the same. If one in four American billionaires are sociopaths, the likelihood of a sociopath being a billionaire jumps from 1.7e-6 for the general public to 4.25e-5 (all other things being equal). The random sociopath is still unlikely to be a billionaire, but is 25 times more likely to be a billionaire than the random person.

That doesn't make it a recipe for success or a magic ingredient, but it's still interesting.

So tired of this garbage meme about public figures being sociopaths. Please show me the study where a trained professional did an actual clinical diagnosis of any of these people.

I can't point to such a study.

But - based on life experience - I believe the meme.

The lottery example is fantastic to explain the misplaced expectation of startups. Indeed if we take a results of lottery winners (Jobs, Gates, Musk etc.) and work backwards on how they got rich, it will point to, "aggressively play lottery".

Right, but at the same time every lottery winner purchased a lottery ticket. If you just say "survivorship bias" and never buy a lottery ticket then you will never win the lottery. My personal goal in life is to play the (metaphorical) lottery as much as I can, within reason. E.g. I'm not mortgaging my house to throw money after my buddy's 'Uber for Planting trees' idea.

Play the lottery, but accept that you could do so for thousands of lifetimes before you win, and unfortunately, you only get the one lifetime.

100% what I wanted to say, but much better expressed that I could have! :)

Steve Jobs is portrayed as Savior of Apple but isn't it true that he was the man who actually drove Apple into ground in the first place by pushing Lisa over Macintosh.

In many ways he was lucky enough to return at a time computing power had caught up to realize the dreams cooking into his head.

In addition to this he didn't had a formidable competition as Microsoft didn't had the right leadership after Bill left. I remember Microsoft demoed Surface back in 2001 but then lost to mobile war completely.

Apple's market failure came in the mid-90's, the Lisa/Mac debacle was ancient history by then.

Nonetheless, some analysis could be done. 1) Identify the variables you believe would count. 2) Identify both the winners and a large population, that could be assumed as the control group. 3) For each variable, calculate a chi^2 (or a t test). 4) Keep the variables where there is a difference in frequency among the two groups (that reach statistical significance, es p < .05). 5) Write the next "how to become billionare" book

If you haven't seen this, you need to: https://xkcd.com/882/

I don't even get how you come to your conclusion. Can you link it somehow to the story? What I see is 150 talented people putting in nearly 20 years of hard work and a lot of money. If you look who did this your "broad population" may be quite small and, I suspect, very closely related to the population of "highly successful people".

Quite right. The best description I've seen of this is Darius Kazemi's talk at XOXO 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw

"...it would be wrong to assume that the secret to success is to play it."

But not playing obviously results in not winning. And in the minds of the lottery-playing population, at least when you play, there's a chance of winning.

Well there's always my plan: wait for some one else to win the lottery and then sue them.

I figure the chances of winning a frivolous lawsuit are huge compared to winning the lottery.

The most likely outcome is losing your money and winning nothing, while there are other ways to make that money which don't involve throwing good after bad.

Any other ideas of making 250MM by investing $1 ? Even if odds are super-low ???

You'd have better odds with committing serious crimes and getting away with it, so there's that. You could take out lightning strike insurance and wait.

Pretty much anything really; the lottery is just a tax on people who can't math.

As others have mentioned, what you've described is survivorship bias and it's prevalent in many places. I found the following to be an excellent and very readable article on the topic.

https://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/

That is incredibly accurate. Well said.

Well your opinion is a popular one for sure. It's very important to a certain set of people to ascribe all success to luck and psychiatric issues. Not a terribly useful or interesting conversation, but definitely popular in a certain crowd.

If there was an award for passive-aggression, you'd win it. I'm not sure if you had much more of a point to make than to single out people you assume to be (I'm guessing here) embittered, but if you did I'd encourage you to make it clearly, and lose the implications.

I'm not the person who opined that Steve Jobs became a billionaire because he won the sociopath lottery.

I'm not sure what was passive or aggressive about my reply. Feel free to explain it to me.

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