We’ve given it all away
I finished Jobs’ biography and I have had a tumultuous time with it, with him, and the whole notion of genius. I remember my Apple II sitting in the living room in that white particle board all in one shelves, desk, return etc. My Apple II – I remember that I had written several novellas and my floppy disk failed and I lost all of my writing and I got down on my hands and knees and said, “WHY WHY WHY.”
Today I found a cartoon I had cut out many years ago that had a man sitting at a desk while behind him sits book shelves laden with books and an angel cruising by the window – “Write about what you know. Write about how writing ruined your life.”
At the end of the biography Isaacson included Jobs’ final words about his life and one thing stood out – Jobs said, “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much and a lot of them just turn off” – the similarities are amazing. I worked for a man that was a lot like Jobs – not nice but amazing. When he left control a power vortex was absorbed by salespeople and the company was forever changed.
I have seen accountants and bean counters ruin a company (large corporations that I have covered), I’ve experienced how a company can turn itself inside out having the cart come before the horse, and I scratch my head over these inanities and have definitely been vocal about them.
But at the end of the day, I am a writer, and not concerned with the business of getting and spending where we lay waste our powers. It does bother me that these geniuses are not good fathers, and are not nice people. Yes there are many clever arguments as to why parenting and geniality are not paramount to creativity and progress. I also don’t believe these nasty geniuses should be medicated either.
Steve Jobs was an amazing genius of our time, but when I read about his daughter Erin and Eve who were sort of dismissed out there while he created all of these devices, I wonder how much the wreckage in his wake was worth the products he invented. Have we a better world because of them? Maybe that question is better left to those girls or even to Lisa, his firstborn who he abandoned a long time ago.