My Neighbor, Steve Jobs

I disagree. I think this story humanizes the guy and helps to dispel the Steve Jobs, Jedi Master, myth.

I agree, but such accounts can be read differently: he's just a normal person. Every normal person has potential to do something great.

There may be some idolizing, but I think it's more about premature eulogizing of a man who's made huge contributions to technology, whether you buy Apple products or not. Ballmer isn't even in the same realm.

Personally, I'm interested in his life beyond Apple. He was an out-of-the-box thinker who went through many serious failures and successes. How could he NOT be interesting? I feel I could learn a lot from him. I certainly learned a lot from his now-classic Stanford(?) speech.

We all really do hope for the best for his health, but we all have this unspoken belief that his days are very numbered.

I suspect that like me, many others feel the need to thank him for what he's accomplished, and reviewing and celebrating his life is the next best thing to shaking his hand.

I bet there aren't any biographies on your shelf.

I personally think that its sometimes the small details that make up the man (sorry, or woman!) and because Steve Jobs is seen as such a success people want to look at what he does partly to look for traits to emulate and naturally partly as curiosity. Yes, there are elements here which are purely 'celebrity' but the interesting thing for me about some of these stories is just how 'ordinary' the guy is. I read one article about his house which is not ostentatious at all. There's a lot that can be learned from people like this and you have the choice to read (or not read) them.

+1, just flag these posts and hope that enough us keep doing the same.

Maybe so, but in today's era of celebrity gossip, I'm thankful for someone to be famous for actually doing something memorable than the endless stream of minutiae about a sequence of borderline NPDs whose only talent is capitalizing on media exposure.

The debate over whether your complaint is valid could seriously span volumes. Frankly, if you truly respected Steve Job's contributions and simultaneously found his personal life of zero interest, I would find that extremely odd.

Most, probably the vast majority of, people become very interested in every aspect of their hero's lives. I'm sure you can think of many reasons why this might be the case, both evolutionarily and practically. The fundamental attribution error notwithstanding, discovering what relationship a particular aspect of genius has to other traits of a person is powerfully interesting to human beings.

Perhaps you literally don't have any curiosity over your heroes beyond their strict niche. Perhaps you have no heroes. Perhaps you don't think Jobs deserves to be anyone's hero. But don't be surprised at everyone else's outpouring of interest, because most people aren't like you.

Yeah -- it was about as textbook as it gets. I respect the guy to no end, but this "article" was pretty absurd. Four-some-odd paragraphs of the author explaining how flabbergasted she was by Job's presence in _her own neighborhood_ and one beyond-cliched moment in which Steve Jobs is -- GASP -- proud of his child.

Great clip. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for posting it.

I should say this: When Steve Jobs talks about intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology people think it's some marketing gimmick. But he was saying pretty much the same thing in 1982, when he was at the top, the same thing in 1997 [1] when the chips were down, and the same thing in 2011 when he was back at the top.

I think a breadth of experiences is pretty important. Whether in a specific field- experience with different types/levels of languages, having done both academic research and grunt work. Or in life- hallucinogenics, life-jeopardizing risks, depression, unfulfilled love. Not to say that one should always have to be a wreck as a person, or never settle and focus on a project or set of languages. But a little time spent increasing your breadth goes a long way than incrementally bettering your depth. And more generally, I have met too many people who always did the 'right' thing to do, always got straight As, but are pretty clueless when they step out of their domain or world view. Creativity, empathy, connecting-the-dots may sound as buzz words because you cannot learn them through books. But not all of it is genetic; a lot of it comes through the breadth of your experiences.

[1] "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." talking about Bill Gates in 1997.

Great find @padmanabhan01, i think this talk is not very widely known about.

Direct link to the audio talk by SJ : http://www.achievement.org/newsletter/audio/jobs-aud.mov

Agreed. it's sometimes hard to remember that these people who communicate with us using the products we buy/use are actually just people like us.

and that's kind of a big deal.

One of the most amazing things about Palo Alto is that the city-provided services are actually good enough that people like Steve Jobs use them, in preference to private schools, fortified compounds, etc. At least, this is amazing to me after living in a bunch of third world places where even lower middle class people try to avoid any contact with neighbors, government-provided services, etc.

(my girlfriend actually went to a Palo Alto high school with Lisa Jobs, too)

"We're dying, Jim. We're all dying."

He's not dying.

Out of curiosity, how does this violate his privacy?

I've done the same thing. Even though I knew he wasn't dead, everyone is talking about him as though he is. And now we're supposed to be surprised by the fact that he's a normal person, just like you and me?

there's a mix of housing in Palo Alto - a fair amount of students and young persons intermingled with home owners of (very) expensive homes. I lived in a $1500/month place on Everett (cheap) and across the street there were million dollar houses, but a block in another direction were a few places that looked like 1920s era sharecroppers houses.