17 ms·

He won the sociopath lottery; he was able to take enormous risks because they didn't particularly faze him. Most people who do that fail horribly, but if you wo

• avaku 10y ago
  100% what I wanted to say, but much better expressed that I could have! :)
• melling 10y ago
  Yeah, Steve spent much of his Apple fortune on NeXT and Pixar. Both could have easily failed. So Jobs was a billionaire in 1995. I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft hadn't invested $150 million in Apple in 1997?
  • izolate 10y ago
    Unknown, but it's overstated how much of that $150 million cash injection actually helped. It's more likely the undisclosed sum (well higher) that kept Apple from the brink of bankruptcy.
  • riprowan 10y ago
    NeXT did fail by most standards. It didn't turn profit and went out of business after a generation or so of products that failed to penetrate the market.
    • jeremiep 10y ago
      They ended up being the foundation of OS X and the box on which the web was invented. Even if NeXT failed as a company they're still a historic milestone.
      • zeristor 10y ago
        NeXT was cheaper than BeOS, wasn't that a key thing?
        • ksherlock 10y ago
          Apple paid $429 million for NeXT. Be was offered $125 million but wanted $300 million.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
    • melling 10y ago
      NeXT was bought by Apple for $400 million dollars and today NeXTStep is running on a billion Apple devices.
      • petra 10y ago
        Without jobs, would it stilll happen?
        • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
          No. Apple was completely lost before Jobs returned. The hardware was a marketing mess, and the software was stuck in R&D hell with no prospect of escape. There were some interesting ideas, but execution and management were all over the place. I don't think Jobs is an example of survivor bias. I think Jobs was an extremely talented marketer with an unusual aesthetic sense. Sociopaths are more likely to kill their companies than make them grow. They love drama, abuse, and terror for their own sake. Jobs was more of a narcissist. He lacked empathy, but he wasn't constantly trying to destroy other people because he enjoyed it. It was more that he knew what he wanted - his own vision of himself as a guru of consumer technology, aesthetics, and creativity - and he didn't care what it cost to get it. Personal and business relationships were all disposable. The vision wasn't.
      • abecedarius 10y ago
        As some wag put it, NeXT bought Apple for $-400 million dollars. (Assuming that's the figure, I don't remember myself.)
    • pyvpx 10y ago
      if you've ever coded for iOS, the NS in all those objects and methods? it stands for NeXTStep
  • kmonsen 10y ago
    They also provided office/IE for Mac at a time when that was really important.
  • jimbokun 10y ago
    "I wonder what would have happened if Microsoft hadn't invested $150 million in Apple in 1997?" But this was't completely luck. It was negotiated by Jobs.
• mrleiter 10y ago
  That is incredibly accurate. Well said.
• jamornh 10y ago
  I don't think you can attribute his success to luck. Yes he did take risk and yes he was a sociopath in that he didn't care much about how much he had to emotionally torment others to get what he wanted. However if you want to compare what he did to winning the lottery, it would be like he bought lottery tickets and then flew down to the loterry operator and did everything he could to fix the game so that he would win. just like how Warren buffet bought over companies and then made sure they run it his way.
  • pstuart 10y ago
    There was luck in being in the right place at the right time, and in meeting Wozniak.
    • snowwrestler 10y ago
      Sure but lots of other people had that luck too. I mean, they all went to computer club meetings and spoke openly about what they were working on. How many other people at those club meetings founded transformational computer companies that survive today, let alone as one of the most valuable companies in the world? Even within Apple there are stories of guys like Mike Scott, who was the 2nd CEO and took Apple public. He was there at the beginning, got super rich, but what was his long-term impact [1]? Have you ever even heard of him, outside of a Steve Jobs bio? [1] He has arguably had a longer-term impact on the mineralogy of gems than in computing.
      • pstuart 10y ago
        It's not pure luck. It's not pure talent/drive/etc. It's the mixture of the two. And yes, I had heard of Mike Scott, but I'm an old geek who's a Bay Area native.
        • snowwrestler 10y ago
          > It's not pure luck. It's not pure talent/drive/etc. It's the mixture of the two. I agree with that. I interpreted your comment above as over-emphasizing luck; perhaps a misinterpretation.
• delinka 10y ago
  "...it would be wrong to assume that the secret to success is to play it." But not playing obviously results in not winning. And in the minds of the lottery-playing population, at least when you play, there's a chance of winning.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    The most likely outcome is losing your money and winning nothing, while there are other ways to make that money which don't involve throwing good after bad.
    • joering2 10y ago
      Any other ideas of making 250MM by investing $1 ? Even if odds are super-low ???
      • M_Grey 10y ago
        You'd have better odds with committing serious crimes and getting away with it, so there's that. You could take out lightning strike insurance and wait. Pretty much anything really; the lottery is just a tax on people who can't math.
  • Avshalom 10y ago
    Well there's always my plan: wait for some one else to win the lottery and then sue them. I figure the chances of winning a frivolous lawsuit are huge compared to winning the lottery.
• djyaz1200 10y ago
  I agree and LOL to "Sociopath Lottery" ... well said. I think using Jobs name in this article is kind of clickbait'ish... the real story here is a dedicated group of talented people with a loving culture made something amazing. Steve didn't do that, he funded that.
• ryandrake 10y ago
  Almost every business book and online article about how $BUSINESS or $ENTREPRENEUR became successful does this. It's infuriating. "Let's wait to see which of the 7 billion people on the planet become billionaires, and then look back and see what they did, ignoring all those who did similar things and did not become billionaires." Totally flawed, yet the public eats it up like candy. Go read Good To Great and prepare to barf. Business schools adore this book. Look at the description on Jim Collins's web site [1]: "Start with 1,435 good companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that became great. Now here's how you can do it too." That's literally Survivorship Bias. 1: http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-gr...
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    Everyone wants to be successful, and no one wants to believe that it's not something they could control if they just knew the "secret". Add that to the fact that no one ever sold a self-help book entitled, "Getting Lucky", and it starts to make sense how we've arrived at this point. Great link by the way.
    • pc86 10y ago
      I think there are plenty of books available on getting lucky. :)
    • ryandrake 10y ago
      We've all done that exercise in school where the professor tells everyone ahead of time to bring a coin to class. Then he has everyone stand up and flip a coin. Everyone who flips tails sits down. Those remaining standing flip it again, those flipping tails sit down, repeat until there is one person standing. Then interview that last person and ask her what her technique was, how could she possibly flip heads 6 times in a row? What hard work and practice did she do ahead of time to make her such a good coin flipper? What daily habits produced this proficiency? This is essentially what we do when we try to be successful simply by asking successful people what they did.
• mayukh 10y ago
  Thank you. Survivorship bias. I sound like a drone when I talk about this in my social circles. Either I do a poor job explaining this or some people are just never going to be able to wrap their heads around this. This and the 'if I only had a good idea I'd be a successful startup' meme are two peeves I try and argue against in vain..
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    Like many biases Hindsight/Survivorship really really feels right to many people, especially if they're not terribly aware of logical and cognitive biases. By contrast what you're saying to them requires them to think in a new way, and maybe let go of some deeply held beliefs. Besides, who wants to believe that we know so much less than we like to pretend, and in fact the books they might have read and loved are just... bull?
• drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  I hate how you're getting static for this. In my personal life I became a lot more successful when I stopped giving a shit about other people as much. I now have a much more fluid morality without being a "bad guy." There's something to be said about how society teaches us to be team players and to not be the squeaky wheel, yet its the non-team players and the squeakers who often win out in life. I think its okay to be sociopath-lite. I believe guys like Jobs were like this. I don't think he remotely was a full blown sociopath. He genuinely cared about the experience of his users. I also this we downplay the sociopathic tendancies of techies who may be on the autism spectrum like Woz. Woz is brilliant, but I don't think he could relate with non-techies. I don't think he ever really understood the benefits of usability while at Apple. He was all about code and hardware and gave no shits about grandmas who didn't want to learn basic or type in archaic commands. Jobs on the other hand cared about usability, but also gave no shits about people in his way. I think there's a wonderful, dare I say, synergy between aspie indifference and leadership sociopathy. They're 80% on the same page and compatible personalities who can work together, but that last 20% is different and focuses on different but important problem domains. Gates/Ballmer is another good example. Or Jobs/Hertzfeld during the Mac years. Or Newell/Lynch at Valve. Or Page-Brin/Schmidt.
• oldmanjay 10y ago
  Well your opinion is a popular one for sure. It's very important to a certain set of people to ascribe all success to luck and psychiatric issues. Not a terribly useful or interesting conversation, but definitely popular in a certain crowd.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    If there was an award for passive-aggression, you'd win it. I'm not sure if you had much more of a point to make than to single out people you assume to be (I'm guessing here) embittered, but if you did I'd encourage you to make it clearly, and lose the implications.
    • oldmanjay 10y ago
      I'm not the person who opined that Steve Jobs became a billionaire because he won the sociopath lottery. I'm not sure what was passive or aggressive about my reply. Feel free to explain it to me.
• erikb 10y ago
  I don't even get how you come to your conclusion. Can you link it somehow to the story? What I see is 150 talented people putting in nearly 20 years of hard work and a lot of money. If you look who did this your "broad population" may be quite small and, I suspect, very closely related to the population of "highly successful people".
• WWKong 10y ago
  The lottery example is fantastic to explain the misplaced expectation of startups. Indeed if we take a results of lottery winners (Jobs, Gates, Musk etc.) and work backwards on how they got rich, it will point to, "aggressively play lottery".
  • hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago
    Right, but at the same time every lottery winner purchased a lottery ticket. If you just say "survivorship bias" and never buy a lottery ticket then you will never win the lottery. My personal goal in life is to play the (metaphorical) lottery as much as I can, within reason. E.g. I'm not mortgaging my house to throw money after my buddy's 'Uber for Planting trees' idea.
    • M_Grey 10y ago
      Play the lottery, but accept that you could do so for thousands of lifetimes before you win, and unfortunately, you only get the one lifetime.
• runjake 10y ago
  > He won the sociopath lottery; he was able to take enormous risks because they didn't particularly faze him. I'm not so sure about that. Having been around during the period when he was canned from Apple, founded NeXT/Pixar, and subsequently came back to Apple Jobs had changed considerably. I think that (and he has stated) that getting canned from Apple was a bit piece of humble pie for him, that he was lost and had to do a lot of self-examination before he picked himself up and founded new companies. Acknowledging his weaknesses and mistakes doesn't strike me as sociopathic, or as being an unfazed man. What he shared with the public regarding his personal struggles is a whole different story. He was never particularly public, especially after the Great Firing. Your other points regarding survivorship bias are point on.
  • mercer 10y ago
    > I'm not so sure about that. Having been around during the period when he was canned from Apple, founded NeXT/Pixar, and subsequently came back to Apple Jobs had changed considerably. This is what makes me most sad about Isaacson's biography. He left out the one period that I was most interested in. The time at NeXT, combined with the developments in his 'family situation' seemed to have really changed him for the better (or at least better at running a company). I was so curious about that, and instead I got stuff I mostly knew about and too-frequent descriptions of Jobs' tantrums/meltdowns. Such a shame. (btw, if anyone can recommend material on this period of his life, I'd love to know!)
    • graeme 10y ago
      Becoming Steve Jobs is more focussed on that period: https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Steve-Jobs-Evolution-Visionary/dp/0385347405/ https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Steve-Jobs-Evolution-Visiona...
      • mercer 10y ago
        Awesome! Thanks for the recommendation.
    • eswat 10y ago
• amirmc 10y ago
  As others have mentioned, what you've described is survivorship bias and it's prevalent in many places. I found the following to be an excellent and very readable article on the topic. https://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
• vivekd 10y ago
  To be fair though, Steve basically did it three times, once with Pixar, once with apple computers, and a third time with rejuvenating apple with mobile tech like the ipod and ipad. There has got to be something to it when someone can pull it off repeatedly. I remember Ellison once called it an experiment, you tried Apple without Steve and it failed, you brought Steve back and watched it succeed, that combined with the success of pixar suggests that Steve is either doing something right or he was chosen as tech emissary by God.
  • endemic 10y ago
    He failed hard with NeXT. 3 out of 4 ain't bad I guess.
    • harmegido 10y ago
      Failed hard by selling a company for a couple hundred million?
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • creeble 10y ago
        Over 400 invested. Ask Ross Perot about the success of NeXT.
        • fragmede 10y ago
          There's the business end of things; Ross Perot himself "only" invested $20 million and got just shy of $70 million out of it when it was finally sold. Total failure. If you squint hard enough with VC eyes, they can almost convince you that $70 million is a terrible amount of money. And then ask Apple where OS X comes from. Ask any iOS developer about Objective-C (though not invented by NeXT, it certainly helped popularize it). Ask the wider world about object oriented programming. If you can see past the bottom of the balance sheet and beyond the next quarter, NeXT lives on, despite not achieving commercial success.
• anindha 10y ago
  If you are in silicon valley you can sample from everyone that took a seed round or everyone that quit their job to work full-time on a startup. In my sample of people I know or know of, the people who took risks created more wealth.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    If you don't play, you can't win, but that's such a basic, entry-level observation that it can't sell books or seminars. People don't want to know the obvious, that if you don't try you can't succeed, they want to know how to select for success.
  • stale2002 10y ago
    I'm not sure about that. The choice is between getting a seed round and going and working at Google making 200k entry level in total comp. I doubt many startup founders beat "just go and work for Google full time"
• drieddust 10y ago
  Steve Jobs is portrayed as Savior of Apple but isn't it true that he was the man who actually drove Apple into ground in the first place by pushing Lisa over Macintosh. In many ways he was lucky enough to return at a time computing power had caught up to realize the dreams cooking into his head. In addition to this he didn't had a formidable competition as Microsoft didn't had the right leadership after Bill left. I remember Microsoft demoed Surface back in 2001 but then lost to mobile war completely.
  • ghostly_s 10y ago
    Apple's market failure came in the mid-90's, the Lisa/Mac debacle was ancient history by then.
• ksk 10y ago
  I think most people realize that there is no secret to success. However it is useful to occasionally ask the question. A successful person might say this is how _I_ did it. Two people are not the same and their situations are not identical but sometimes its worth narrowing the gap so that you have less variables. Certainly luck plays a huge role and most people recognize this, but then again trying to emulate (non shitty) aspects of someone's personality/habits/environment is very common, even in the tech industry. "Which editor do you use", "What is your vim config", "Which laptop does Linus Torvalds use", "What music does X listen to while coding", etc etc.
• sweetdreamerit 10y ago
  Nonetheless, some analysis could be done. 1) Identify the variables you believe would count. 2) Identify both the winners and a large population, that could be assumed as the control group. 3) For each variable, calculate a chi^2 (or a t test). 4) Keep the variables where there is a difference in frequency among the two groups (that reach statistical significance, es p < .05). 5) Write the next "how to become billionare" book
  • mark-r 10y ago
    If you haven't seen this, you need to: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
• matt4077 10y ago
  That term "sociopath" gets thrown around a lot, but it's so far off base, real sociopaths are starting to feel sorry for Steve Jobs. As revealed recently, he denied Tim Cook's offer of a partial liver transplant. Something that can only be explained with empathy, a lack of which is the primary indication of what's called "sociopathy". To name just a few more of the signs of sociopath that Steve Jobs didn't fit: inability to plan ahead, lower intelligence, delinquency, violence, financial irresponsibility,... Basically, what people mean is "he could, at times, be a bit of an asshole". I'm not even sure about your assertion about risk-taking because I can't think of any events that deviate significantly from the risk-taking of similar companies. It's also hard to say how much his "being an asshole" contributed to Apple's success. Getting people to work 80+ may be a strategy to lower costs, but I don't see how it helps, for example, with the iPhone, created at a time where money wasn't the limiting factor at Apple.
  • mercer 10y ago
    If anything, and if we're doing arm-chair psychoanalysis, narcissism (in the clinical/professional sense) seems more applicable.
  • iaw 10y ago
    He chose homeopathic remedies when first diagnosed with cancer rather than the known and proven effective treatments. By the time he realized it wasn't a joke the effective treatments were too late. He used his wealth and influence to get on organ transplant lists in numerous states. At the time doctors were publicly confused because the organ could no longer save his life, only extend it. This action likely cost another person their life. With his final days he designed and built a super-expensive yacht... Steve Jobs may not have been sociopathic but he wasn't someone that cared about the well-being of others. He was the first member in the cult of his own ego.
    • mercer 10y ago
      > He chose homeopathic remedies when first diagnosed with cancer rather than the known and proven effective treatments. That strikes me as stupid / naïve more than sociopathic. > He used his wealth and influence to get on organ transplant lists in numerous states. At the time doctors were publicly confused because the organ could no longer save his life, only extend it. This action likely cost another person their life. That's selfish, true, but I could see myself doing something similar when faced with the fear of death. It's human. Not admirable, but human. > Steve Jobs may not have been sociopathic but he wasn't someone that cared about the well-being of others. He was the first member in the cult of his own ego. I'm not sure he was introspective enough to be a member of the cult of his own ego, but yeah, he wasn't a nice man. No argument there.
• bartkappenburg 10y ago
  I have the same 'issue' with other professions. Before the tech-industry was big, you had the occasional CEO saying: "I started in the mailroom!", implying that you too can be a CEO one day. That's reversed reasoning gone wrong: the chance that a CEO worked in the mailroom is a million times bigger than that a mailroom employee is bound to be a CEO. Same holds for famous artists: talk to their parents and they probably say that he/she was always singing with a fake microphone in front of a mirror. 90% of the kids do that...
  • dvtv75 10y ago
    20 years ago, my grandfather kept telling me that if I wanted to "get into computers" I should get a job as a cleaner, because if I worked hard as a cleaner the boss would notice me and promote me. Didn't listen when I told him that cleaning was all contracted out and the "boss" would never see me working hard as a cleaner.
• nartsbtaa 10y ago
  Working backwards or forwards, the result is the same. If one in four American billionaires are sociopaths, the likelihood of a sociopath being a billionaire jumps from 1.7e-6 for the general public to 4.25e-5 (all other things being equal). The random sociopath is still unlikely to be a billionaire, but is 25 times more likely to be a billionaire than the random person. That doesn't make it a recipe for success or a magic ingredient, but it's still interesting.
  • ryanwaggoner 10y ago
    So tired of this garbage meme about public figures being sociopaths. Please show me the study where a trained professional did an actual clinical diagnosis of any of these people.
    • raarts 10y ago
      I can't point to such a study. But - based on life experience - I believe the meme.
• mogigoma 10y ago
  Quite right. The best description I've seen of this is Darius Kazemi's talk at XOXO 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw