A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
“Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
I've experienced this firsthand. I've been privileged to work with some great web designers. I've forced myself to wait a minimum of 24 hours before rejecting a design and it has always served me very well. Sometimes your first reaction is going to be negative but in a day or so it reverses. I am not certain why this is true but for me it's been a winning strategy.
I've just completed designing a logo for the project I'm working on. Lacking experts around me whose judgement I could rely on, I came up with the following creative process:
1. Come up with an idea and prepare a demo/prototype.
2. Show the demo to a few people around you, preferably those who have some semblance of taste, but they don't have to be experts. If you own a smart parrot, the parrot will do. Since you want to avoid disclosing your idea to competitors, those people should preferably be either close friends or ones who work in a completely different field.
3. Note their reaction. If it is silent or if they say something generic and don't go with an enthusiastic "WOW" in the first three seconds, they are unimpressed. Expect them to be unimpressed, but don't worry about it right away, because even if you showed them, for example, a Paul Rand-designed logo pretending to be your work, they would not recognize it either and would remain unimpressed (they are not experts, remember?).
4. Wait 24 hours. Then ask yourself if you are bothered at all by the disinterest of the people you showed your work to. If you are indeed bothered, it means that your intuitive/emotional brain is telling you that your work is not good enough and that you should go back to step 1. If you are not bothered at all, it means your work is as good as your intuitive judgement is, and you can move on.
The goal is to convince yourself that your work is good enough. Once you achieved that, the opinion of others doesn't really matter. I find this algorithm to be pretty efficient; it lets me hone in on a correct design within a week's time. Your mileage may vary.
So I tend to think that a negative reaction is often a sign you have something good, but flawed. You don't want people saying "yeah, that's kinda cool", you want them saying "OMG THIS THING SUCKS I'M TRYING TO GET IT TO DO X BUT I CANT BECAUSE IT DOESNT HAVE FEATURE Y" - at least in the second case you know you have something they want, and you know how to fix it.
But, my step 4. is slightly different. I also give them some time; and 24 hours is an excellent choice.
Now, I ask them to draw me the logo they saw the other day, and reiterate it in words. Depending on how they respond you should take action. If they can't recall it, you should start from scratch. If they can mention a few things, especially details, you should revision your work such that you make these very details even more bold and stand out. In the end, a good logo is something that is unique and well remembered.
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeancoctea100975....
But we are off-topic, this is again a Jobs thread, unless someone dare compare Sixtine Chapel (priceless) and an Ipad (expensive)?
Does anyone look at the Apple II and think it would be a beautiful design for a computer today? Or the orignal Mac? Or even the Steve Jobs 2nd go-around products G3? Original iPod? Original MacBook?
As for the eulogy, there have been so many amazing things said about Steve Jobs, my wife has been a massive Apple fan for a long time and when she read what Obama said there were a few tears.
2) I finally realize what has always fascinated me about him. He was ALWAYS working, with every single breath he took. He seems to have found a way of taking the hazy concept of "work" as it is commonly understood, and elevating it to a more in-focus ideal form through which to understand and shape his life.
Sidenote: I hate broccoli too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heiligenstadt_Testament
But we also know that he gave himself excellent pep talks and then kept going for another thirty years, writing great stuff long after his deafness was far worse than it was in 1802. So, yes, it seems that Beethoven eventually came to agree with you!
And, come to think of it, as I remember Beethoven's biggest complaints about deafness centered on loneliness, and on his fear that nobody would want to hire a deaf composer. I don't actually recall him complaining that his work might suffer. So that's another point in favor of your argument.
But his composition just got better, so in fact his declining fame as a performer was balanced by his increasing fame as a composer.
And yet, it would certainly put a dent in some of my abilities.
YT: That's the problem with you hackers, you're always working.
HT: No, that's what hackers _are_.
"What the fuck do you want?"
"Y.T., I'm sorry about this. But something's going on. Something big time. I'm keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven."
"The problem with you hackers is you never stop working."
"That's what a hacker is," Hiro says.
"I'll keep an eye on this Raven guy, too," she says, "sometime when I am Then she hangs up.I love literary Easter eggs like that.
Makes me want to donate more to medical research (my favorite foundation is SENS.org, but there are many good ones). I think it's okay to be sad, but we also have to do something to make things better.
Thanks for writing this, Mona.
It is scary to think what Steve could have accomplished if he lived into his 70's.
Right now there's someone working on the next billion dollar start-up in his garage that's going to blow us all away because he was inspired by Steve.
That's Steve's greatest legacy.
"He managed to inspire a whole industry, while doing what he truly loved. Millions of entrepreneurs world wide have been inspired to do the same as a result of his work. This may be his greatest legacy and something that will live on in all of us long after his passing."
So what was the most causative bottleneck stopping more new products and creations? Clearly not financial limits. Apparently not a lack of ideas. Was it logistical organisation of stuff? Managerial organisation of people? Which was the most constrained resource? Had anyone studied it or tried to optimise it?
When trying to create something disruptive and radical, it is much easier to screw things up than to get them right. (There are more Dunning-Kruger poster children with grandiose over-estimates of their own ability out there than there are actual geniuses.)
Most corporations are structured to restrain loose cannons in positions of authority, because everybody except the loose cannon in question is afraid of losing their meal ticket. (See, for example, the recent fiasco at HP, where Leo Apotheker decided to turn HP into a fundamentally different kind of corporation and did immense damage to internal groups that didn't fit within his vision.)
The standard form of corporate restraining structure is the committee. Committees are designed to promote consensus decisions, and consensus decisions stop random-looking outbursts from happening. From the stake-holders' point of view, this is a good thing. However, committee decision-making gets in the way not only of the very common bad internal entrepreneur, but in the way of the much rarer good internal entrepreneur.
The last time Steve Jobs answered to a committee was 1985. And they fired him. Thereafter, he carefully structured his working environments as start-ups, where the founder could impose their autocratic will on the company without having to drag a boat anchor of committees after him. For most people, this would have been disastrous. Luckily for Jobs, he was as good as he thought he was.
Because that doesn't bode well for Apple in future. Or for any of us looking to ape them.
From all popular accounts, Jobs was an intensely private man about his personal and family life; something refreshing in an age when celebrity is conflated with talent and young people like Mark Zuckerberg opine that privacy is an anachronistic social norm. Love him or loath him -- and there is certainly enough evidence to support both reactions -- the conversation is almost always about the work and Steve Jobs as a professional. As one who still values the notion of personal privacy, I’ve always been grateful for that.
Yet what makes this piece so potent is that Simpson reflects primarily on Steve Jobs as a person: a brother, father, and husband, not a boss, or showman. In so many ways, her eulogy could be applied to any person who has lived fully and loved their family deeply.
There’s quite a sublimity in that contrast, something I suspect was not lost on Jobs and his family in the creation and dissemination of this eulogy and the Isaacson biography to the public.
And perhaps on that point, it’s wonderfully surprising that Steve Jobs, widely considered an arbiter of taste and design curation, wasn’t yet familiar with Mark Rothko -- one of the premier painters of the 20th century -- until the final year of his life.
What distinguishes Jobs is he existed in layers from exceedingly public, second hand, apocryphal to private.
What I love about this is it feels like a balancing of that gradient.
This line is so beautifully & hauntingly crafted. I wish I had thought to add her books to my reading list sooner.
She might not have had Latin, so may not have known it was a literary technique in Latin, and perhaps Greek, a way to start a story with no intro, just by jumping right into the action.
One can only wonder what he was referring to. Such a well written piece.
"Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."
I assumed the "Oh wow"s referred to each of those people.
It seemed to me like Steve got to that place he was referring to when he last talked to his wife.
> He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.
It's not exactly a "place", but you can only do so much with words.
Imagine fully realizing that you're one with the Universe ... and then your mind shuts off, your body dies, there is no more action, what you where is no more, there is only silence. The end.
But that's a good thing!
You can experience ego death relatively safely using various techniques, which science has shown is the same as a near death experience. This is covers most of the experience of dying, minus the last part.
I don't like the emphasis on "last words" anyway. When I'm dying (and probably not especially lucid), I don't want to have to cope with the pressure that any set of words could be my last and hence I'd better make 'em good. I think we should let everyone record their official last words ahead of time, just so there's one less thing to worry about when you're actually dying.
The idea of pre-recording one's last words, though, is brilliant!
'Pressure'? Exactly what are you afraid of happening if you screw up your last words??
O I dye Horatio:
The potent poyson quite ore-crowes my spirit,
I cannot liue to heare the Newes from England,
But I do prophesie th'election lights
On Fortinbras, he ha's my dying voyce,
So tell him with the occurrents more and lesse,
Which haue solicited. The rest is silence. O, o, o, o.
I have a half brother, ten years older. We didn't grow up together. Mona's story gives me hope that there are relationships we seek out later in life that are just as fulfilling, if not more so, than those we are given as children and take for granted.
http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/What-is-the-story-about-Paul...
Great writing, his final words were striking.
The ending takes my breath away.
Instead of charity, if the billionaires or super smarts like gates, larry/sergey, bezos,pg etc can live in ordinary people situations for 2-3 days a year, their imagination will fuel creations that benefit all. Is this not tried already ?
And there are a lot of ways that rich people can't actually get anything more special than anyone else, at least not easily. It's not feasible to build hospitals just for rich people, so a billionaire goes to the same hospitals as ordinary people. Consumer electronics don't generally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so a billionaire has the same kind of stuff ordinary people have.
Indeed. I've run into Steve three times. Twice we were both shopping for produce at a natural food store (Country Sun in Palo Alto, and the old Richard's Natural Foods in Los Gatos).
The last time was just a year ago. I sat down for dinner on the patio at La Strada, a nice Italian restaurant on University Avenue a few doors down from the Palo Alto Apple store, and there were Steve and his daughter at the next table. After dinner they took a stroll down University Avenue, just the two of them. I imagine they were probably going to get some frozen yogurt. I thought to myself, "Doesn't he have some security? A bodyguard? Something?"
There are a lot of Silicon Valley executives who I'd recognize if I saw them. But Steve is the only one who I've ever run into doing ordinary things like produce shopping.
He redesigned things around his hospital room because he had a pad and pencil, and he was bored. There's no reason to believe that the X-ray machine he drew was better than the X-ray machines designed by X-ray machine designers with a better idea of the details and tradeoffs involved with designing X-ray machines. And that's no insult to Steve, because I'm sure he knew that too -- he was just drawing for the sake of drawing.
This eulogy claims a lawyer called Mona. But the biography, in chapter 20, claims it is Mona's mother, Joanne, who called:
""" [Joanne] had never told Mona that she had a brother, and that day she broke the news, or at least part of it, by telephone. "You have a brother, and he's wonderful, and he 's famoous, and I'm going to bring him to New York so you can meet him," she said. """
I hope someone takes his sketches and runs with that vision. He's been able to re-imagine other devices wonderfully. To think of what he could have done with hospital equipment is amazing (that at his core, at his most vulnerable, he resorts to creativity) and sad (that he won't be around to execute upon these visions).
"Oh Wow".
One can only wonder...
I know it's automated, but still :/
But the part about going through 67 nurses did give me a little chill. My heart goes out to those poor 64 people who tried and failed to care for him up to the level of his demanding standards.
It is true that to demand better than good is a tough challenge but I suspect it is why people look to Jobs with some confusion: he expected the best from himself and from those around him. In a regular corporate setting, that may seem dictatorial; in a hospital or care room, that seems psychotic; but in either case, it is about trying to inspire people into giving their best and breaking through to new levels.
Buddhist Billionaires can be confusing.
From your other comments we know you're not a troll and that you worked at Apple. So I find it regrettable that you can't say this here. Two forces prevent it: the taboo against speaking ill (i.e. objectively) of the dead, and the cult of personality. That's not to say that SJ isn't a fascinating character and the OP moving -- I feel both those things too -- but there's a lot of myth-making going on here. The author is a novelist. That's what novelists do.
Edit: not to share your description, necessarily. He seems too emotional to have been a normal sociopath, if there is such a thing. That's one thing I like about the OP - it dwells on the emotional side.