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I've been criticizing Gruber more often than not, but I found this one to be a to the point, fairly balanced piece - especially around the visionary vs. tweaker
by blinkingled 15y ago
I've been criticizing Gruber more often than not, but I found this one to be a to the point, fairly balanced piece - especially around the visionary vs. tweaker vs. inventor part.
But his gripe about the Jobs' biography still doesn't make enough sense to me, particularly this part -
What it was that Jobs actually did is much of the mystery of his life and his work, and Isaacson, frustratingly, had seemingly little interest in that, or any recognition that there even was any sort of mystery as to just what Jobs’s gifts really were.
I attribute that to personality traits, intuition, timing, persistence, character and may be some other intangibles that we don't yet fathom. It's not one single tangible thing that you can point to and say - hey this is it, if you do it this way you can be another Steve Jobs, another Einstein, another Picasso etc. It's more like art than science - you can't really nail it down, pin point it, list it - it's certain basic elements of the art mostly covered with the artist's expression ability, personality, imagination, composition et.al and that's not really something that a biographer can resolve in a biography. Biographer's job is to lay out the life and work of the person and let people make their own inferences of the subtleties, of where it worked, why and why not. Some will "get" it, many won't. Some will be able to apply it in many nondescript ways and many won't have any use of it.
- tomlin 15y ago> I've been criticizing Gruber more often than not, but I found this one to be a to the point, fairly balanced piece - especially around the visionary vs. tweaker vs. inventor part. I as well. And I like Gladwell, I just think he and Isaacson have seriously misrepresented Steve Jobs and what he did in his life & at Apple.
- evanlong 15y agoSpecific points please.
- pilsetnieks 15y agoDon't get me wrong, I like Gladwell and his writing but the usual criticism is that he cherrypicks useful facts and disregards conflicting ones so that he can build up his case. If you try to refute him point by point, you can't because every fact in his essays is correct. Every specific point is going to be correct and irrefutable but conclusion drawn from them would be just so wrong.
- calyth 15y agoI don't agree with Gruber's gripe about Gladwell's view of Steve Jobs being a tweaker. It's easy to point out that no one is a visionary if a visionary has to come up with something completely fresh. And I agree with Gruber on that front. Yet Gruber, and Jeff Atwood on a tweet, really had a problem with tweaker. Casting that visionary / innovator argument aside, Gladwell rightly pointed out that Jobs improved on an existing object, and took it to the next level. Macintosh stemmed from Xerox, iPod stemmed from the existing music players, iPhone stemmed from the BlackBerry and Treos at the time. But he created new products that are truly leaps forward from what they were. And he did it iteratively. Yet people see the word tweaker and think that was a put down. To me, Gladwell's piece serves a good reminder to people that without Jobs, computers, music players and phones existed. Jobs created the computers, music players, and phones that we know it today. Drawing the percentage of change needed to call Jobs an innovator or a tweaker is like defining how many whiskers would have to be on a guy's face to call it a beard.