> It turns out people like Woz need people like Steve Jobs, and people like Steve Jobs need people like Woz.
The former is truly unlikely and the latter is desperately true but omits the context completely and paints things in an almost pleasant light which frankly seems wrong to me.
It turns out that people like Woz have a completely different metric for things like happiness and success than people like Jobs. If Jobs had been hit by a bus before Woz met him, Woz would have gone on to have as long and happy a life as he's had because he'd still have made cool stuff and that makes him happy (something most of us, I would guess, can grok). He wouldn't, in all likelihood, ever have had a problem getting work doing fun stuff because talented people are rare and so tend not to have that problem. And he'd probably have made enough money to be comfortably well-off, he might even have struck it rich, but it wouldn't have been a necessary condition for him to be happy and fulfilled.
On the other hand, had Woz been hit by a bus, Jobs probably wouldn't even be a footnote in history at this point and would have died miserable because his metric appears to have used the accumulation of wealth as the definition of success and happiness; and he wasn't capable of building things without guys like Woz. Guys like Jobs, without guys like Woz, are generally just unproductive drains on society. Wooo, you had a long-term vision for a new product. Yes, you're special. Because nobody else ever watched star trek and then thought a tablet computer would be neat. Nobody ever read or watched science fiction and thought to try to make the gadgets described in there.
Yeah, right. I know who I'd point my son at as a role model, and it's not Jobs.
The former is truly unlikely and the latter is desperately true but omits the context completely and paints things in an almost pleasant light which frankly seems wrong to me.
It turns out that people like Woz have a completely different metric for things like happiness and success than people like Jobs. If Jobs had been hit by a bus before Woz met him, Woz would have gone on to have as long and happy a life as he's had because he'd still have made cool stuff and that makes him happy (something most of us, I would guess, can grok). He wouldn't, in all likelihood, ever have had a problem getting work doing fun stuff because talented people are rare and so tend not to have that problem. And he'd probably have made enough money to be comfortably well-off, he might even have struck it rich, but it wouldn't have been a necessary condition for him to be happy and fulfilled.
On the other hand, had Woz been hit by a bus, Jobs probably wouldn't even be a footnote in history at this point and would have died miserable because his metric appears to have used the accumulation of wealth as the definition of success and happiness; and he wasn't capable of building things without guys like Woz. Guys like Jobs, without guys like Woz, are generally just unproductive drains on society. Wooo, you had a long-term vision for a new product. Yes, you're special. Because nobody else ever watched star trek and then thought a tablet computer would be neat. Nobody ever read or watched science fiction and thought to try to make the gadgets described in there.
Yeah, right. I know who I'd point my son at as a role model, and it's not Jobs.