What Have You Written Lately?

Here are my most recent written posts:

• The Human Species
• The Real Haves and the Real Have Nots
• How Steve Jobs will be remembered
• Smash Your Smart Phone and Throw it in the Garbage (video)
• I will single-handedly stop “gallon-smashing”
• My thoughts on: The Harlem Shake
• My thoughts on: Getting a tattoo
• Is online pornography a matter of life and death?
• When should I stop wasting time?
• For some students, school is a reward. For some students, school is torture
• “But they will never take our freedom!” (Will they?)
• Look out! The daily routine is a trap
• 13-18 are important years
• On Violence and Guns
• The good thing about school is the bad thing about school
• If guns are your thing…

How Steve Jobs will be remembered.

Main point: As time passes, Steve Jobs will be recognized more and more as the genius and focused visionary that many people had long recognized him as.

Side point: Have you noticed more and more pundits and executives talking about “taste”? As in, “good taste [was]… almost completely nonexistent” (re: Samsung) and “Microsoft has never been cool, has never had good taste” or “Steve Ballmer has no taste”.

On those rare occasions when Steve Jobs would talk with the media, he sometimes described other companies as “having no taste”. Implying that taste matters and that Apple had taste.

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.” (1996)

Related video: (from 2006)

It’s about love, after all.

I watched “Black Hawk Down” (again) recently and near the end of the film, Eric Bana’s character (Delta Force Sergeant Norm Hooten) talks to Josh Hartnett’s character (Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann) about why he does what he does (fight, kill). Hooten says, “…it’s about the men next to you… and that’s it. That’s all it is.”

Which seems to be another way of saying, “It’s about love.”

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, one of the countless remembrances was from Larry Brilliant who said, “The defining character of Steve Jobs isn’t his genius, it isn’t his talent, it isn’t his success. It’s his love. That’s why crowds came to see him.”

Here is what Steve’s sister said after he passed: ““Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.”

The incomparable Seth Godin says that the two elements of a great presenter are: 1. Respect, 2. Love.

So it’s all about love, after all.

Mike Daisey’s one-man show not as great as early reviews raved.

I first heard about Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” when the NYTimes (my favorite paper) had an article on it a couple of weeks ago.

Since the show was about someone I very much admired, I read up on the show, I downloaded the script from Daisey’s site, I read multiple reviews, and I watched interviews on Youtube.

I didn’t like the script I read. It sounded… false. I started writing about it, but didn’t finish my writing. Everyone seemed to love the show. What John Gruber describes was also my experience: “Daisey’s supposed stories always set off my spidey sense“.

Now we know that Daisey was lying.

(Sigh)

Official: Apple is twice as big as Micrsoft

It happened four days sooner than I expected: Apple is now twice as valuable as Microsoft.

That is so large and so impressive.

Plus Apple dominates customer satisfaction polls.

Maybe Steve’s philosophies work. (Note to self and all leaders: model Jobs. Only.)

Only Apple

A clear account of what makes Apple, Apple. By John Gruber.