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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

It's always interesting to think about who has had the more successful, fulfilling life between Woz and Jobs.

Jobs had far more financial success, and was involved in the release of far more products, was far more famous than Woz, but died young and had...complicated relationships with everyone in his life.

Woz cashed out when he had enough to enjoy doing whatever he wanted for the rest of his life, organized music festivals, taught kids about computers and technology, played with cool gadgets, seems to be beloved by everyone who ever knew him, and is still going strong at 70.

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> It's always interesting to think about who has had the more successful, fulfilling life between Woz and Jobs.

“You smell like a toilet.” This is what Steve Jobs told his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs while on his deathbed, she wrote in her new shocking tell-all memoir about her bumpy relationship with her father.

“I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love,” she wrote.

In her memoir, titled “Small Fry”, Brennan-Jobs says that a lot of her memories with her father were not a typical father-daughter relationship. She talks of him denying paternity despite a DNA match, not sending financial help to her and her mother, and saying mean things to her in the little times that he spent time with her.

It's like he enjoyed inflicting unhappiness on others. Is sadistic the correct name for that or perhaps psychopath?

He just seems like someone who was incapable of enjoying anything he couldn’t perfect, including people. I wonder how he viewed his daughter, someone directly from his own matter but so alien to himself.

If that is true he was very shortsighted because he was far from perfect himself. I wonder is that he hated his daughter's mother and couldn't stand the thought of a daughter who was half her's. The daughter didn't count. Anyway he could hurt her was a way of hurting her mother, all the way to his deathbed.

Steve's own parents abandoned him (gave him up for adoption) when he was young and so Steve was raised by foster parents. His foster parents seemed to have been really nice people, but perhaps Steve might have had difficulty connecting with his first biological daughter because he couldn't connect with his own biological father. Just speculating of course ...

Even if he couldn't have connected with her emotionally he could so easily have looked after her financially as she grew up. To have left his daughter in poverty when he was so wealthy is just the pits. I can't admire a man like that.

While certain aspects of his life are tragic, Jobs certainly did exactly what he wanted and what he could best.

Yes, the difference between the two "what he wanted" is the point.

The best non harsh comparison among the two I can think of is "without Jobs there would be no iPhone; without Woz there would be no Apple".

So did Woz.

Can't we be happy that both of them put a dent in the universe, in their own ways?

They certainly put dents in a lot of people's wallets, I'll give you that.

cmon

He literally did (if you put your iPhone and wallet in the same pocket).

Given the nature of the dents Jobs inflicted, no, happy is definitely not anywhere on the list of relevant adjectives.

The "putting dent in universe" SV meme (i.e. being a big player and constituting a big change, without that much regard for ethics) needs to die. Consider that Hitler has also put a pretty sizeable dent in the universe... I think we should be more specific about the nature of the change, i.e. we should be explicit that it's a change for the better.

Both followed their own muse.

Perhaps Job's muse seems more cruel. But what else could he do?

This is the correct answer. I doubt either man chose his path as such, their paths chose them.

Steve Jobs acted the way he did because that's the kind of person he was. Some of us have worked for people who have styled themselves (and maybe even literally described themselves) as being like Steve Jobs. Invariably they're not, and this is just a key for them to unlock their inner asshole and bestow it on others around them. They create a toxic work environment that does not end up producing the next ipad.

Likewise there is a lot to admire in Woz's life, but for someone not naturally wired that way to try and emulate it, it just wouldn't work.

Steve Jobs had won and he knew what effort to put in to get where he got. And he probably got fulfilling moments here and there but his drive to succeed must come with some downsides. Woz on the other hand calmly followed his passion and was probably always fulfilled for he did what he liked.

Jobs always reminds me of John Lennon. I honestly don’t understand how either man could care so little for their own child through their formative years. I’m glad both men tried to fix things (very late). Both also died far too soon.

For one, Woz is still alive.

Not speaking about Woz vs Jobs specifically of course. But, having a longer life is not necessarily better than having a shorter successful life. I would rather die at 60 with no regrets than live to be 90 with a lifetime of regrets.

When you're alive you can change and grow but when you're dead it's final. 90 with a lifetime of regrets is a closure blow out sale bargain.

Let’s say I really wanted to compete in a triathlon, have kids and see them grow up and have families of their own, be a surgeon, etc.

How many of those could I do starting at 60? There are lots of life choices it’s easy to make at 25 that are not easy to make 65.

Even something as simple as 3 month cross country road trip. My parents retired at 55 and did that twice. My parents are still independent, but with their eyesight and hearing going they couldn’t decide at 75 to hop in their car and spend three months on the road.

Healthspan and lifespan of people is continuously improving, and I am hopeful the science has just started. Maybe in 2100 people will be as able at 70 as they're at 30 now. Maybe many people will grow old and unable, but then scientific development will let them cure themselves, and have a second life of sorts.

I donate to Lifespan.io in the hope of this.

Changing your mind, repentance, and learning are extremely important and possible for all 90-year-olds except for the severely demented. I've known one 89-year-old who changed her mind on a very important (negative) core value she had her whole life.

So how does “changing your mind” lead to a better quality of life and having all of the options in your 90s that you have in your 30s.

Virtue is a better quality of life in itself.

Kind of cherry-picked there from the set of things 60 is too old to start. What about having 30 more years to fix a wrong you once committed, repay a debt, help give some worthy person or cause a boost?

At 60 years old, unless I stayed in shape, I doubt I would be able to run half marathons in a decent time, enjoy a decade of being a fitness instructor, fail miserably at real estate and marriage and recover from both (reset my career, get remarried, and still have enough time to rebuild my net worth), etc.

I lost a large part of my net worth between those two things - but I had the income to both enjoy life and to recover.

Everything I mentioned above happened between the time I was 25-35. Some good, some bad but I don’t regret any of it.

I wouldn’t take nearly the risks in my 60s that I did in my 30s. If I broke a bone in my 20s while doing some of the crazy stuff I did, I could heel. Not so much in my 60s.

I got a chance to start over with a new family making better choices in my 30s. I was still young enough at 35 to run with my sons, take them to the gym with me. At 85 not so much.

Are we really arguing that there are opportunities you have between 30-50 that you can’t make up for between 70-90?

Would you rather have been Steve Jobs or Ronald Wayne?

Spoken like a person who is nowhere near 60 years old.

Is 46 close enough?

Let him who crawls enamour'd of decay, Cling to his couch, and sicken years away: Heave his thick breath, and shake his palsied head; Ours - the fresh turf; and not the feverish bed. While gasp by gasp he falters forth his soul, Ours with one pang - one bound - escapes control.

- Byron, The Corsair

People here seem to be very close minded with regards to this. But I agree, living longer is not necessarily better. They didn’t even say that it was always the case, just that it might not be. Geez.

“Death is very likely the single best invention of life”

Steve said that. You don’t have to agree. But you can’t deny that these people who might not have lived very long have changed things: Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Steve Jobs. To definitively declare that you must live long to live a fulfilling life is insulting to those who haven’t the opportunity.

One unpopular opinion about Jobs is: he pursued absurd, unsustainable and likely unhealthy diets.

One of his diets was a poorly designed "fruitarian" diet consisting of eating one kind of fruit for weeks, or drinking excessive amounts of fruit juice like Odwalla carrot juice... or sometimes, just fasting for long periods of time.

Very few people live like this, so there is not much medical literature about the implications of this lifestyle. I think this could have contributed to his health decline.

Pancreatic cancer could be genetic but we basically don’t know what causes it. The diet theory is a bit speculative imo

Steve Jobs' diet and eating habits were extremely unusual and we simply do not know if they were viable or not.

Only fasting currently has any scientific support as a method to inhibit cancer growth.

https://osher.ucsf.edu/patient-care/integrative-medicine-res...

Jobs attempted to defeat his cancer initially through diet alone. His cancer was operable and potentially curable, but he wasted too much time chasing fringe diets and it cost him his life:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

So many experts seem to believe they are experts in everything instead of just their subject areas.

I don’t think he believed himself to be a master of everything but I get the clear impression he was leaning into an eastern/Indian spiritual tradition and likely even believed himself to be spiritually enlightened or on the cusp of enlightenment. So he thought he could heal himself, and possibly didn’t mind dying. After all, his last words were “Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!”

> His cancer was operable and potentially curable...

His absence is such a loss to the tech industry that this is hard to digest, even after a decade.

I was just about to mention—

I was in hospital recently for acute necrotizing pancreatitis (not fun, it will be a long time healing, if ever—fingers crossed).

I have to stick to a low- to non- fat diet (~ 30g or less a day) and occasionally have to skip eating altogether for half a day to several days if I'm feeling discomfort or pain. In hospital I wasn't allowed to eat anything for days. Just some water or fruit juice and, thankfully, hydromorphone.

Trying diets isn't very surprising. Even pancreatitis seems to vary in what diet will work for people. It sounds like some have to avoid fibre, others need more fibre. Some can go back to eating fats without straining the pancreas and some can't go near any. It's awful, especially because of how unpredictable and difficult the pancreas can be. It's not totally out-there to just try things related to diet as a last ditch attempt, if you ask me—but it's also not based on clinically-proven science either. (Except for fats and alcohol in the case of pancreatitis). Further, there is a dearth of layman information and community for pancreatic illnesses which can be disheartening and probably inspire just trying anything.

But during my experience everything I've heard about pancreatic cancer is that it's essentially a death sentence—and a horrible one. (Cursory look at the US National Cancer Institute—relative survival rate after 5 years is about 10%)

Different beasts. Trying a diet treatment for potentially-curative pancreatic cancer is surprising - as it’s effectively suicidal.

Pancreatic cancer is curable if it’s caught soon enough. (And I seem to recall that Jobs’ disease was thought to be atypical in some positive way, although details were obviously limited.) The problem is that due to the anatomy of the region, the disease is often advanced before symptoms are noticed, or noticed and thoroughly investigated.

I'm not saying he was right to experiment with diet. I was just saying it's hardly surprising given what we do know about pancreatic treatments and the dearth of public and accessible information.

Much of the information out there is either garbage or medical research papers. Most information on any pancreatic illness involves diet/digestion and potential surgery.

This stuff has been on my radar because unfortunately severe cases of pancreatitis can precede chronic conditions[0], cysts, tumours, and potentially even pancreatic cancer.

Jobs seems to have had a liver transplant. That says a couple of things. If the cancer had spread to his liver his chances were not good. His cancer was of the islet cells. Islet cells are the part of the pancreas that regulate blood sugar levels. So immediately he was staring down diabetes with surgery and removal of a large portion of them. There are surgeries (we've looked at them as possible futures) to transplant islet cells to the liver in order to try and avoid becoming diabetic if part or all of the pancreas has to be removed.

So this is a completely uneducated guess and only speculation, but if he was looking into islet cell transplants[1] prior to pancreatic head removal then he may have wanted a healthy liver first. Information relating to those details hasn't been made public to my knowledge. Most of the information surrounding his health seems as if it was measured in its releases. Also that he had a Whipple procedure it sounds like he was also having more traditional treatments.[2] Diet is also a part of treatment and symptom management and, from personal experience, the diet is pretty well the same as that for pancreatitis.[3]

Being that he lived 7 years after what is publicly known to be his diagnosis, he beat the average by a couple of years. That puts him in the 90th percentile of all pancreatic cancer deaths (at least according to the present figures I mentioned before which don't differentiate between types of pancreatic cancer).

[0] https://pancreasfoundation.org/patient-information/pancreati...

[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overvi...

[2] https://pancreasfoundation.org/patient-information/pancreati...

[3] https://pancreaticcancercanada.ca/diet-nutrition/

Pretty sure I remember reading that he was literally days from death from liver failure, when he finally got his liver transplant. I therefore suspect it wasn’t trying to get a normal liver for some sort of experimental islet-cell transplant – it was just about survival. Whether his liver was failing due to metastatic cancer or complications of the Whipples’, who knows – but I suspect the former, considering what ultimately happened.

You’re right he beat the odds, time-wise... but this is what being a billionaire with a team of world-class oncologists at your beck and call will do for you. He had full genome sequencing of his tumour before it was widely accessible, and it’s reasonable to assume that based on the results of this, his team will have tried a variety of atypical and possibly experimental treatments.

The fruit diet is definitely suspect, but fasting is a practice that humanity has used (to great effect) for thousands of years. If anything, fasting should be practiced more, by everyone.

This is a great question, they both did end up taking different path in life. It's hard to say one is better than the other for me.

Some great questions don’t need to be answered.

In many ways, because Woz is still here and Jobs isn't, Woz "won."

Are there any CEOs that reached such levels of success without being at least a bit nasty - nasty to their employees, friends and family? Makes me wonder if being nasty is a requirement ...

I see a lot of good about and from Mark Cuban. He seems like he's mostly a good person. There might be less positive stuff I'm not aware of though.

Edit: my favorite is him donating money by saying f*ck while wearing a shirt with three commas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJjjAeob_Ms

The CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison, is pretty widely regarded as being a sweetheart, and at the age of 31 he’s already got almost 50% of the net worth Jobs had when he died. Arguably then, he’s far more successful for his age, and far kinder. There’s many other examples too, so this toxic “CEOs have to be assholes to succeed” trope should really die. Jobs was more likely successful in spite of his sometimes cruel idiosyncrasies, and almost certainly not because of them.

Andy Grove?

In this regard, I think there are some similarities between Woz and Paul Allan, the co-founder of Microsoft. Although Bill Gates have certainly changed over the years.

I wonder if either of them could have been happy being the other.

However, Jobs had a much bigger impact on the world. local vs global. https://sive.rs/local

depends on how you measure impact. If you're a teacher and you educate thousands of kids that arguably has more of an impact than being successful at selling a lot of gadgets, it's just not compensated as handsomely. To take it to the extreme, you can be a world famous celebrity for a decade or two but a few years after you retire nobody remembers who you are.

from the article

>"But something felt wrong. After a day of talking, I was often exhausted and unfulfilled. Two hours spent with one person who wants to “pick my brain” is two hours I could have spent making something that could be useful to the whole world, including that one person. Then people in America started emailing to ask why I’d been so silent. No new articles? No new projects? Nothing?So there’s the trade-off. When I’m local-focused, I may be useful to my community, but I’m not being as useful to the rest of the world."

the real problem here is mistaking the gratification one gets from github stars with the real impact one can have over a lifetime, and it doesn't always feel gratifying. Help one person instead of writing a thousand blog posts, don't confuse being well known with being genuinely useful.

I see your point, but it seems like something would have filled the void. There was no shortage of talented people wanting to drive global tech.

In the case of Woz, I'm not sure someone would have filled the gap for the local good he did. It may have just not happened.

Every kid coming into SF wanted to be Jobs after that movie.

I wish more of them had wanted to be like Woz. I think the "impact" of the world would have been much better.

It's not a competition.

Thomas Midgley Jr. had an even bigger impact on the world than Steve Jobs. That's not the only measure of success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

>Legacy

>Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and Freon. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny". Use of leaded gasoline, which he invented, released large quantities of lead into the atmosphere all over the world. High atmospheric lead levels have been linked with serious long-term health problems from childhood, including neurological impairment, and with increased levels of violence and criminality in cities. Time magazine included both leaded gasoline and CFCs on its list of "The 50 Worst Inventions".

>Midgley died three decades before the ozone-depleting and greenhouse gas effects of CFCs in the atmosphere became widely known. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol phased out the use of CFCs like Freon.

That was a good read. Thanks for sharing!

> Jobs had a much bigger impact on the world.

He created the App Store fiefdom which taxes developers more than their government. It also compelled them to price their work at less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

He turned the general purpose computers in most Americans' lives into locked down, tightly controlled "experiences". (The iPhone, which lacks the ability to install whatever you want.)

He created an expensive laptop that isn't user upgradable.

His company is now suing a mom and pop healthcare app for having a logo shaped like a pear, which seems par for the course.

He sold status and glamour, and he wasn't a very good person. You can praise him if you want, but I think he's the epitome of selfish and don't consider him a role model. If you have to behave like that to win, it isn't worth it.

Gates, for all of his flaws, is doing really good work to make this world a better place. I look up to him instead.

People seem to forget 90s Bill Gates. He was terrible and spiteful. There's no reason Jobs wouldn't turn into the current Bill, if he was able to live that long.

Jobs died age 56. Gates is 64 now and started his philanthropic endeavors in 2000, 20 years ago, when he was 44.

Jobs could have done it before he died. He didn't. No need to theorize.

Plus Gates always struck me as more balanced than the narcissistic Jobs. Plus Melinda has been a great influence.

>His company is now suing a mom and pop healthcare app for having a logo shaped like a pear, which seems par for the course.

Dare I say, it seems, pear for the course...

Gordon Gekko types would disagree.

Gates wants to ban encryption that the government can't break. Don't look up to either of them.

Lol. Yeah he never reformed, he just got better at brand management.

Opinions on Jobs aside, I remember thinking this on the day he died. I couldn’t think of a person alive who had more impact on the world.

Woz for a simple start. Seriously, Jobs was great at selling himself. There are literally millions of people alive today having more impact than Jobs, it's an insult to all of them to think he had such a massive impact.

Apple never happens without Woz, and Jobs would have had a completely different career.

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