“ Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
E.B. White via Letters of Note
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
Speaking of Charlie Brunonian Christmases, here’s our very first tree, which we saved from a fiery death and decked with handmade ornaments.
“You’ve baked a great cake, but you’ve frosted it with dog shit. Back to the drawing board.”
Steve Jobs: visionary, wordsmith.
The tragic and the obscene exclude each other. (via Letters of Note)
From a memo I wrote two years ago in preparation for the Fortune piece —
Jobs, even back in the early days of Apple Computer Co., has believed that he was “changing the world.” He used — and still uses — this rhetoric often in his public MacWorld presentations, and lured Scully away from his presidency at PepsiCo with the line, “do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”
The difficulty that stems from Jobs’ reliance on this rhetoric is that he does not, when one initially stops to think about it, try to “change the world” in our normal perception of the phrase, as a political, environmental, or philanthropic activist. Jobs essentially never makes public political statements; Apple has been criticized for, and made only modest attempts to improve, its lack of concern with its environmental profile; Jobs does not, or at least not publicly, donate vast sums of his money to charity.
But this initial assumption is incorrect, at least in Jobs’ frame of mind. To Jobs, technology is, as he said in the video clip I sent you (see above), is humanity’s ultimate tool. He notes how we, as bipeds, are of a low or middling rank of mobility compared to other species — but give us a bike and humanity is afforded its real place in the ranking of the animal kingdom. As we’ve evolved for the better, so have our tools. By continuing to stretch the limits of technology, Jobs is expanding the evolutionary capacity of a human being.
Moreover, with his commitment to his vision of getting an Apple in the hands of every person in the world, Jobs has done more than perhaps any other to raise computers to a position where they become a widely used tool. Were it not for the graphical interface that Jobs thrust upon the Macintosh in the early 1980s, computers could still be run upon imputing lines of code. Jobs took the computer and made it approachable. What we forget, these days, is that computers have not always been the extensions of ourselves that we now take them to be. Jobs took a product that was used by nerds and scientists and made it as vital to everyday living as electricity. (Consider how the internet is now considered a utility in the modern home, as basic as water or heat!) And given Jobs’ dedication to perfectionism and finding a better product, rather than the cheapest and most functional, he’s pushed technology into markets that simply did not exist fifteen years ago (the iPod, the iPhone). By taking technology available firstly primarily to tech-heads and making it simple, approachable, and user-friendly, Jobs turns technology from a collection of circuits into an extension of our personalities.
There’s a quote from Jobs in Leander Kahney’s Inside Steve’s Brain that expresses this in less explicit terms:
“As he told Rolling Stone in 2003: “We were very lucky—we grew up in a generation where music was an incredibly intimate part of that generation. More intimate than it had been, and maybe more intimate than it is today, because today there’s a lot of other alternatives. We didn’t have video games to play. We didn’t have personal computers. There’s so many other things competing for kids’ time now. But, nonetheless, music is really being reinvented in this digital age, and that is bringing it back into people’s lives. It’s a wonderful thing. And in our own small way, that’s how we’re working to make the world a better place” (Kahney 150-151).
Essentially, changing the world for Jobs is bringing a new capacity to his consumers on a widespread scale, and from the Macintosh, the first personal computer to use a graphical interface that was accessible to non-techies, to the iPod, the first easy-to-use and attractive mp3 player, Jobs has done just that. And, keeping with his evolutionary thinking, it is increasingly difficult for many to think of their lives as complete without their personal computer, iPod, or iPhone by their side; these gadgets enhance and complement human experience.
The amazing benefit of this belief on Jobs’ part is that it trickles down through the company culture and, to some extent, its consumers. ”People do believe that Apple is changing the world,” Kahney quotes one former staff member as saying, “not everyone believes in 100 percent, but they all believe it at least a little” (Kahney 155). Regardless of how aware of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” they might be, they are truly motivated towards the fact that they are changing the world, creating what seems to be an incredibly dedicated and hardworking workforce that puts in long hours even for Silicon Valley. Likewise, consumers buy into Apple not because it is a computer, but because it is a lifestyle — it isn’t a machine that will do the job; it’s a purchase choice that aligns the consumer with counterculture and a demand for ever-increasing perfection. They don’t pay premium because Macs necessarily have the most amazing tech specs in the industry — they buy a Mac because it is an experience and a reflection of their beliefs.
