[b]Walter Isaacson
I was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word ‘computer’, plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book.[/b]
Well, the guy was a fucking genius, right?
Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.
Nope, no one like that here.
Unless of course you ask them.
One of Job’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.
You know, as cannibals go.
Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. “It was great,” he recalled. “I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat”.
Now that takes me back. Well, sort of.
…he never finished any of the works he began because, so sublime was his idea of art, he saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.
Unlike, say, the Leonardo da Pinheads here.
The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.
Smart phones? You tell me.
