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Comment by nsns | Hacker News Reader

What you describe is very childish behavior, infantile even, but I believe you are right about Jobs being like that, and I think this might explain why he was so good at making toys adults crave like children. But we shouldn't idolize someone like that, IMHO, this isn't healthy conduct. Even if he has made a lot of money during certain periods of his life, it does not vindicate his behavior or make him a proper role model. Being a responsible adult is a lot harder, and there are things more important than financial profit.

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Who said anything about money? He changed the game multiple times in multiple industries, and had his greatest successes as he was fighting death. If you compare his net impact vs. actual wealth he was a pauper... and esp if you look at his stake in Apple, as the majority of his wealth was from Pixar/Disney.

There are too many 'responsible adults' wallowing in mediocrity who more than anything else actually drag the system down. Maybe you can look up to them as role models on how to raise a family (although I personally would disagree as the majority fail at that anyway)... but how to leave a mark on this world and push for excellence, I will look to people like Steve, Musk, Frank Lloyd Wright, Edison/Tesla, etc. Please don't conflate the two.

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 sure Steve Jobs was a lonely person (after reading the Isaacson book), despite having people around him.

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.

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

You forget that even the "Canadian" one, Shuster, spent his life from the age 9 on in America and both were US citizens and did all their work in the US.

According to the book, he used to take quite a few vacations with his family and be at home with them a lot... Why did you conclude he was a lonely person?

To put it bluntly, Google is happy-clappy hippie wonderland in comparison to Apple, yet there are no stories of the top echelon being absolute cunts to each other. Success is not reliant on dictatorship. You don't have to be a horrible person to be honest, you don't have to be a tyrant to demand and foster excellence.

Exactly because the dictatorial aspect can as much backfire as it can succeed. Remember Jobs had his fair share of successes and failures, its that the successes were mostly accumulated up towards the recent part of his life thus making him look more successful than he probably was.

> What you describe is very childish behavior...I think this might explain why he was so good at making toys adults crave like children.

The key is not the childishness. The key is that he cared about important things in the context of making and delivering a great product.

I've played at a number of Irish Traditional sessions around the country. In one town I lived, there was a very bad drummer who was there every week without fail. No one would say anything out of politeness. After about a half a year, I took it on myself to say something, not in a mean but in a matter of fact way. Her ego was bruised, but on doing that several other musicians immediately thanked me. It seems that everyone there prioritized politeness over the level of musicianship possible, even though they knew it compromised quality.

I think it's entirely possible to change one's priorities without being mean or childish, even to the extent of inverting socially accepted priority orderings. Not everyone is going to appreciate what you're doing, but if your heart is in the right place, and you are behaving constructively towards your craft, your customers may well appreciate you.

(As much as possible, leave out the childishness.)

EDIT: You can also invert this -- let emotional baggage leak into your "concern for craft" and your behavior will very much be counted against you.

It is childish. I think it would be nearly impossible for a normal adult to act that way, because part of growing up and becoming an adult is learning to repress emotional outbursts like that and most people are not even going to feel very strongly about design details in the first place.

The lesson is that design details do matter, and when you pay attention to them it has a cumulative effect that results in a much better product. You do have to develop a certain amount of callousness to pursue your vision. You don't have to scream and berate people, but when you're sending a design back for the tenth time, you're bound to start thinking "Gosh, this designer is going to think I'm an asshole." A lot of people will just accept something that's not exactly what they want just to avoid potential bad feelings from someone else.

The emotional aspect made it easy and natural for Steve to pursue the design until it was exactly what he wanted. Indeed, it probably made it nearly impossible for him to do anything else. The rest of us have to consciously override social impulses that value getting along and being liked higher than small details. The upside is that we get to manage our response so we can motivate with something other than fear.

It's an USAism to think that "growing up" mandates "repressing emotional outbursts".

In many parts of Europe it's expected that grown men have emotional outbursts. Repressing them gives the impression of rigrid and cold humans which you should not trust.

It is very American, but I think we get it from the English. They of the stiff upper lip.

And the English got it by trying to make themselves seem like the opposite of the French.

I don't think the OP meant it that way.

To me part of being a grown up includes the ability to act with reason and tact under great distress. I've managed to do this once in my life when I was attacked by a good friend in a very harsh way because of complex reasons, and our friendship might have ended right at that point if I had let my emotions get the best of me.

I once had a boss who had an emotional breakdown almost every day at the office because things weren't going as he expected them to. He did not inspire me to do good work. He just instilled a fear in me that syphoned energy away and kept me from fully focusing on my work.

It was depressing, really. I will never know what Steve Jobs was like to work with, but I don't think I would have liked working for him, although he obviously got some good stuff out of his people.

Doesn't need idolizing - he made himself an icon, and there's the right-place-right-time factor. His biography never says "Be like me" by any stretch of the imagination.

Nobody is a perfect role model - everyone has faults. Is his attention to detail something we shouldn't forget? I think so. Is childish behavior the way to lead people? Not if it means tantrums and inappropriate responses - but then again, we may lose to much of the child in all of us when we hit the corporate world... there should be room for some playtime and wonder in the things we build.... nobody is perfect.

It's awfully hard to say a billionaire who made such an impact on people all over the place and died far too young isn't someone we should learn a bit about if we can, is it? (There are more out there than just Steve Jobs, of course... biographies exist. Jobs is just fascinating and current.)

Maybe we can idolize him and not seek to become him, but try to be somewhere in the middle.

Jobs wasn't just a successful visionary, he was also a guy who bought a hundred identical black polo shirts to last him till he die, and someone who refused medical help for an entire year and tried to cure his cancer thru diet (which might have made a fatal difference, we'll never know), Do you really wish to idolize him, or just the benign and successful aspects of his personality? Can these even be differentiated?

You don't want to idolize ANYONE, but you can respect imperfect people for the good things they did.

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