Jobs
“It’s a cliché to say that Jobs was a man of deep paradoxes, but paradoxical people are a lot rarer than you’d think.”
“They call the charisma emanating from his keynote addresses Steve’s reality-distortion field.”
“He exists somewhere between showman, perfectionist, overseer, visionary, enthusiast and opportunist, and his insistence upon design, detail, finish, quality, ease of use and reliability are a huge part of Apple’s success.”
“All of Apple’s products are an expression of Jobs’ obsession with perfection and detail (…) Apple doesn’t run focus groups (…) Most companies specialize in one or two things: hardware, operating systems, web services, consumer devices, retail. Apple does them all at once. It’s insane.”
Steve Jobs: The Genious Who Changed Our World by Time Magazine.
Last Friday night, I went to the theater to see ‘Jobs’ a new biopic on Apple’s co-founder. This is no cradle to gravel picture. The movie’s narrative prioritizes some critical Apple events while disregarding some key other in Jobs’ life. It also seems to leverage quite a few creative licenses .
Nonetheless, this is an entertaining movie from beginning to end anyway: it conveys Job’s conflicting paradoxes, twists and genius. And, interestingly enough, Kutcher delivers a good performance.
Though, when it comes down to key Job’s lessons in live, it is best to go to the source and watch his Stanford commencement speech where he talked about finding what you love without compromising, coupled with the need for connecting dots across the board while ‘staying hungry and foolish,’ a remark which he borrowed from the Whole Earth Catalog’s final issue, a farewell message.
“Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. he knew that the best way to create value in the twenty first century was to connect creative with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.”
“He was not a model boss or human being (…) he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.”
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.