Είναι συχνό λάθος. Εξυψώνουμε ανθρώπους που δεν αξίζουν αυτή την θέση. Ακόμα και αν είναι οι χειρότεροι χαρακτήρες, επειδή πέτυχαν κάτι σημαντικό κάπως τους συγχωρούμε αναδρομικά όλα τα υπόλοιπα. Το παρουσιάζουμε σαν μια τραμπάλα: ή θα επικεντρωθείς σε κάτι σε βαθμό κακουργήματος αγνοώντας φίλους, οικογένεια και όλα τα άλλα ή θα είσαι…άνθρωπος.
Τον Steve Jobs μας τον βαράνε με διάφορες ατάκες του και αποφθέγματα στα social media σαν να ήταν ο Μεσίας. Παραθέτω αποσπάσματα από την επίσημη βιογραφία του. Αυτή στην οποία διάλεξε ο ίδιος τον συγγραφέα και μέχρι και λίγες μέρες πριν πεθάνει είχε την έγνοια να δώσει στο κοινό μια πλήρη εικόνα της προσωπικότητάς του. Εσείς θα τον θέλατε αυτόν τον άνθρωπο για πατέρα;
He was never destined to win a Father of the Year trophy, even when he had spare time on his hands. .. his primary focus was on his work. He was frequently aloof from his two younger daughters, estranged again from Lisa, and often prickly as a husband.”
I had a young family. I had Pixar. I would go to work at 7 a.m. and I’d get back at 9 at night, and the kids would be in bed. And I couldn’t speak, I literally couldn’t, I was so exhausted. I couldn’t speak to Laurene. All I could do was watch a half hour of TV and vegetate.
People also had to put up with Jobs’s occasional irrational or incorrect assertions. To both family and colleagues, he was apt to declare, with great conviction, some scientific or historical fact that had scant relationship to reality. “There can be something he knows absolutely nothing about, and because of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows what he’s talking about,” said Ive, who described the trait as weirdly endearing.
Whether it involved personal topics relating to his family and marriage, or professional issues relating to engineering or business challenges, or health and cancer issues, Jobs sometimes simply didn’t engage.
In the past he had been rewarded for what his wife called his “magical thinking“—his assumption that he could will things to be as he wanted. But cancer does not work that way.
Powell had been a vegan when they were first married, but after her husband’s operation she began to diversify their family meals with fish and other proteins. Their son, Reed, who had been a vegetarian, became a “hearty omnivore.” They knew it was important for his father to get diverse sources of protein.
Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.
The family hired a gentle and versatile cook, Bryar Brown, who once worked for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. He came each afternoon and made a panoply of healthy offerings for dinner, which used the herbs and vegetables that Powell grew in their garden. When Jobs expressed any whim—carrot salad, pasta with basil, lemongrass soup—Brown would quietly and patiently find a way to make it.
On some nights he would stare at the floor and ignore all of the dishes set out on the long kitchen table. When others were halfway through their meal, he would abruptly get up and leave, saying nothing. It was stressful for his family.
One day during dinner he was discussing with his family where to take his girlfriend for dinner. His father suggested Il Fornaio, an elegant standard in Palo Alto, but Reed said he had been unable to get reservations. “Do you want me to try?” his father asked. Reed resisted; he wanted to handle it himself. Erin, the somewhat shy middle child, suggested that she could outfit a tepee in their garden and she and Eve, the younger sister, would serve them a romantic meal there. Reed stood up and hugged her. He would take her up on that some other time, he promised.
Later Jobs took his son out to the barnlike storage shed to offer him one of his two bicycles, which he wouldn’t be riding again. Reed joked that the Italian one looked a bit too gay, so Jobs told him to take the solid eight-speed next to it. When Reed said he would be indebted, Jobs answered, “You don’t need to be indebted, because you have my DNA.”
…the whole family took off in early July for Kona Village, Hawaii, which was the first leg of the trip. But in Hawaii Jobs developed a bad toothache, which he ignored, as if he could will the cavity away. The tooth collapsed and had to be fixed. Then the iPhone 4 antenna crisis hit, and he decided to rush back to Cupertino,
in 2010, when the family was planning a trip, Erin wanted to delay the departure by half a day, but she was afraid to ask her father. Eve, then twelve, volunteered to take on the task, and at dinner she laid out the case to her father as if she were a lawyer before the Supreme Court. Jobs cut her off—”No, I don’t think I want to”—but it was clear that he was more amused than annoyed. Later that evening Eve sat down with her mother and deconstructed the various ways that she could have made her case better.
In February 2010 Jobs celebrated his fifty- fifth birthday with just his family. The kitchen was decorated with streamers and balloons, and his kids gave him a red-velvet toy crown, which he wore. Now that he had recovered from a grueling year of health problems, Powell hoped that he would become more attentive to his family. But for the most part he resumed his focus on his work. “I think it was hard on the family, especially the girls,” she told me. “After two years of him being ill, he finally gets a little better, and they expected he would focus a bit on them, but he didn’t.”
“I’m disappointed in Obama,” he said. “He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss them off.” He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s not a problem I ever had.”
Andy Hertzfeld once told me, “The one question I’d truly love Steve to answer is, ‘Why are you sometimes so mean?'” Even his family members wondered whether he simply lacked the filter that restrains people from venting their wounding thoughts or willfully bypassed it. Jobs claimed it was the former. “This is who I am, and you can’t expect me to be someone I’m not,” he replied when I asked him the question.