“One of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys,” Walter Isaacson writes for The New York Times. “After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.”
“But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take,” Isaacson writes. “Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune.”
Isaacson writes, “So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical.”
Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
True.
“he made the Zune” – Classic! Could’ve said Mr. Gates peddled shit and would’ve meant the same thing.
To be fair, it was not Gates who made the Zune (and Jobs was one of these who made iPod), but I understand that Isaacson was talking figuratively.
So, have many of you already have read all of the biography?
As far as I know, along the lines readers could understand that Jobs was a jerk. Did, however, Isaacson “crack” the rest of the story?
I read the book and I did not care for it. Steve Jobs was much more than what Isaacson wrote about him. After finishing the book I was ledt wondering is this all he could write? Disappointed considering how important a human being Steve Jobs was.
Maybe there will be extended second edition?
As to Gates and Jobs being “smart versus “genius”, this is beautiful concept to theorize, but at least Jobs being supposedly less smart than Gates it is not necessary true.
Remember that Jobs was smart enough to consume so much knowledge as child that the school wanted him to attend high school right after fourth grade.
Also, Jobs told that he could mathematician, if he would not be into computers/gadgets.
True. He was obviously VERY bright – I think the example given with the monkey logic problem is more related to Steve’s knack for only focusing on what is really important and throwing away everything else. This is where his brilliance really lies. It’s quite possible that he thought it would have been a waste of time to focus any real thinking cycles on a trivial riddle.
Of course, if it was only a few months ago when it happened, it could also have simply been that he had much more obvious things on his mind, like his rapidly deteriorating health.
Research has shown that there is not one kind of intelligence, but many. Some are inuitive and imaginative, like Jobs, Einstein or Mozart. Others are analytical, like Gates. Others have a sense of anticipation and athletic intelligence, such as that displayed by Wayne Gretzky or Chris Evert. Others have emotional intelligence. We used to think that you were smart or dumb. But the more that we learn about the human mind, the more we come to understand that there are many ways to display intelligence.
We are blessed to have lived in an age where some exceptional people like Steve Jobs gave us the gifts of their genius.
“Hence, the Macintosh. Sure, Xerox came up with the graphical desktop metaphor, but the personal computer it built was a flop and it did not spark the home computer revolution.”
Corrections:
1) Xerox Alto was not “personal computer”, it was floortop workstation with the price of a car that almost no one really bought/could buy.
2) Macintosh was second PC regolution. The first was Apple II, before which there were either “do it yourself sets” or boxes with tumblers that have nothing to do with what we know as “PC” since Apple II. Or there were minicomputers, which is totally different category.
For an excellent insight about the Xerox PARC visit, I strongly recommend that you read “Creation Myth” by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. It’s an excellent article that tells the story not just of the stock-swap-for-visit story of Apple being allowed to look “under the kimono” but also how Xerox squandered tremendous technological discoveries because the starch shirt corporate executives back east didn’t have a clue.
You should also read Mike Elgan’s insightful article in Cult of Mac, “In Defense of Steve Jobs”. Elgan nailed it. I have come to appreciate that Elgan gets it, and he really puts it to the naysayers and haters like obscene and self-important Richard Stallman with his article.
And, if you read Isaacson’s book, he makes clear that Apple did not steal – in today’s terms, the stock compensation that Apple gave Xerox would be worth more than $365 million for the opportunity of the three day visit to PARC. Bill Atkinson took what Xerox developed for the star far beyond what they did. If you clicked on a window with the Star, it brought up a menu of choices to make. Also, windows could not overlap each other. Atkinson in his genius figured out how windows could overlap, how a folder would open when clicked, and Quickdraw, which allowed for the creation of circles and rectangles using a Motorola processor that could not calculate square roots needed to generate such a function.
Read these two articles. They are well worth your time.
I liked the connection between the similar “ingenious” thinking processes of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Ben Franklin.
About a third of the way through I was really enjoying it, despite the fact that Jobs was made out to have been a jerk. He might have been, but he obviously wasn’t just a jerk, but as I carried on it just became a broad history of what he did at Apple which basically reiterated the same points over and over without really cracking him as a person and how he changed or offering any insight into him. It was a decent enough read, but I ended up slightly disappointed in it.
“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used” Carl Sagan
Also, see Isaac Asimov’s comments on intellignece:
http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html
intelligence is a bad word to typo.
Point taken. Next time, try holding down the shift key at the beginning of your sentence, and don’t use a noun as a verb. 🙂
533 1/3 bananas….
answer to the monkey problem…
read the book. I found it quite enlightening. I could hardly put it down until I finished.
Another thing to consider: pain killers, which Steve was extremely likely to have been taking so close to the end, can seriously affect one’s mental alertness.
So Bill had a brilliant conscious mind, and Steve had a brilliant subconscious (eg. Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”). Over and over in the Bio, we hear about Steve’s Intuition, like some kind of John Lennon type artiste. Most of his business success comes from pushing his intuition through the group with an Iron Fist, and an unshakeable stare.
Quite literally, at points in the book when he gets bumped, he flicks on the eyes, that look that just bores into your soul, and his ‘obstacles’ just crumble right in front of him.
Yes, Bill Gates was a Computer Scientist at heart, and Jobs was an artist.
There are at least 5 modes of “Intelligence” and learning:
Logical, left brain (the scientist)
Intuitive, right brain (the artist)
Emotional (what makes people tick)
Physical (sensory)
Spiritual (not Religion, but awareness of the “Greater Whole”)
The ways in which Steve Jobs embraced and balanced each of these modes of intelligence is what defined his particular brand of genius.
You forgot “anal” – thinking out of your arsehole.
This appears to be the mode of intelligence employed by most analysts.