I came across one of Steve Jobs' lesser known excerpts / Quotes, it gives real insight into his outlook on life at least in his younger years. The following is excerpted from a piece Joe Nocera wrote about Steve Jobs for Esquire in 1986, when Steve Jobs was 31, he had just resigned from Apple and was starting his new company NeXT.
Jobs at NeXT. Photo via waybeta.com
“Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time,” he says, “you have to give up other lives you could be living.” He gives a shrug that implies that this is a small price. “You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished,” Again, the same it’s- worth- it shrug. “Especially if the desire is not to be a businessman, but to be a creative person...
But isn’t he a businessman?
“My self- identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful to people. I like working with very bright people. I like interacting in the world of ideas, though somehow those ideas have to be tied to some physical reality. One of the things I like the most is dropping a new idea on a bunch of incredibly smart and talented people and then letting them work it out themselves. I like all of that very, very much.” There is a note of excitement in his voice. “I’ve had lots of girlfriends,” he adds. “But the greatest high in my life was the day we introduced the Macintosh.”
And Apple?
“Apple,” he says slowly, searching for the right analogy, “Apple is like an intense love affair with a girl you really, really like, and then she decides to drop you and go out with someone who’s not so neat.” Lewin, who is sitting next to Jobs, immediately chuckles at the seeming absurdity of the comparison, and that makes Jobs chuckle too. But Jobs truly did love Apple; in a weird way it seems right that he should compare it to a passionate affair.
Mostly he speaks about Apple with more sorrow than anger. There was a time when he thought he would always be connected to it— taking sabbaticals from time to time, but always coming back. Coming home. He clearly regrets that that possibility no longer exists.
He will not say anything at all about Sculley, nor will Sculley speak publicly about Jobs; not long ago the Apple president, under contract to write his autobiography, simply could not bring himself to “tell all” about how he bested Jobs. But both men are obviously saddened by their falling out.
One mutual friend recently bumped into a limo driver who occasionally drives both men. “Whenever Sculley or his wife gets in the car,” the driver said, “the first thing they ask is, ‘How’s Steve?’ ”We have almost arrived in San Francisco. “I think I have five more great products in me,” Jobs says, and then goes off on a long, rambling discourse on the joys of working on computers at this particular moment in history. He compares it to what it must have been like to work for Henry Ford when the automobile was still in its infancy and the technological boundaries were there to be broken. “It must have been the most incredible feeling,” he says, “to know that this was going to change America. And it did!” He grins suddenly. “If we can create the kind of company I think we can, it will give me an extreme amount of pleasure.”
The New York Times has graciously made the full piece -- reprinted as Chapter 2 in Nocera's 2008 Book Good Guys and Bad Guys -- available here. Embedded below as well.
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