The 25 Smartest Things Steve Jobs Ever Said

The Motley Fool ^ | October 7,2011 | Morgan Housel

[Defiant]

So your point is, LSD is ok because other legal drugs are worse? First of all, I doubt your premise is correct, and if it was, it has nothing to do with whether it’s a good idea to encourage LSD use.

[Revolting cat!]

LSD was legal until the end of the 1960s. (Imagine this discussion in 1965.) Then your beloved government capriciously delegalized it, deciding FOR YOU what’s good for you, deciding with apparently your slavish consent. When Prozac gets illegalized, as it should, will you instantly approve as well? There are reasons for and against hallucogenic, mind altering substances, many if not most, found in nature, and used by people for thousands of years, and modern bureaucracies, politicians and believers in the wisdom of fickle, corrupt governments, such as you seem to be, have nothing to teach me or the rest of humanity about them, good or bad, even if they are indeed B-A-D! I trust the wisdom of thinkers and philosophers who have tried or not tried these substances.

[Revolting cat!]

I didn’t answer your question, or challenge as it were, and I didn’t mean to offend you, sorry.

I think that Steve Jobs’ point about acid was not to encourage the general use of LSD (nor was it my point), but to suggest that an attempt at temporary legal or not mind alteration would have done Bill Gates some good in helping to expand his intellectual territory, his imagination, and knowing what I know about Bill Gates (he’s a bridge player, for Chrissakes!) I agree.

[Defiant]

I think the idea that Bill Gates should have been more wild as a youth is interesting, and if you want to say that, fine. I disagree, because then he wouldn't have been Bill Gates, a focused, driven, dweeb of a guy who was perfect for his company, as Jobs was for his. I think the notion that Gates should have tried acid is dangerous, because Jobs is so highly regarded that it might encourage an increase in LSD usage. I am not an expert, but from anecdotal data, there are a significant number of bad experiences among those who have tried that drug, and for many people, it leads to lifelong issues. For some, it certainly provides inspiration to later creativity, but in my opinion, no one should take something with such risks, at least without more research about the size of the risk. It's like playing Russian Roulette with your life. I'm glad it worked out for Steve Jobs.

I wasn't offended. You make me laugh more than just about anyone around here.

[Revolting cat!]

I can’t disagree with what you said having seen acid casualties myself,
though I suspect that Jobs was referring to the
latter day unimaginative Gates, the Buffett bridge partner!

[Weirdad]

Great point — thanks for such a clarifying comment.

[Defiant]

I don't know why you insist to arguing for LSD by arguing against prozac. The two are not logically related. I love the government quite a bit less than Ronald Reagan did, would return it to the 1800s and limited powers in terms of its duties. States have certainly always had power to regulate drug use, and the feds would only have the right to regulate interstate commerce in drugs. Strict libertarians are against any drug laws, but I am not among that group. If you are, more power to you, enjoy your hallucinations.

As for prozac, you seem to have a thing about it, it's your catch-all straw man. One of my best friends from college jumped off a building in Manhattan a few weeks after being put on prozac back around 1990 or so. He left two baby girls. I am familiar with Prozac. Maybe you went through something similar and can't let it go, I don't know, but, again, it has nothing to do with acid.

[Kickass Conservative]

Did he say “become a monthly Donor to Free Republic”?

Must have been #26.

[Kirkwood]

Congress should live by No. 9. Having bills that are 315,000 words in length in sheer idiocy.

[Revolting cat!]

Prozac a drug, even if legal, LSD is a drug, prior to 1970 legal. It could have, might have, was considered to become a medication, then who knows. Like Prozac it isn’t found in nature, it is a synthetic man made substance. I’m not hung up on Prozac at all, only heard of a few known people who suffered from its effects, while you have a more personal experience of the same sort. It is simply a convenient comparison object, and not all comparison objects are straw men. The phrase straw man itself has become a ‘straw man’, if you catch my drift.

The states and the feds regulate medications, and it’s good until they go over the top, as FDA often does, but who is to regulate them?

In all it’s a tough issue, legalization of currently illegal drugs, and I have no idea what is right, what isn’t, but the legality or otherwise of Steve Jobs’ use of LSD is of no relevance to me, and I won’t condemn him if he had used it.

[RoadTest]

“You’ll know what’s in the bill when it’s passed”

[RoadTest]

He went in the right direction there. Man evolves a product over a long span of time, gradually improving it until it’s elegant.

God, able to look into the far future, sees the end product at the beginning and just makes that one.

[af_vet_rr]

I’m a goddamn cynic and I’m impressed. Why haven’t we heard this before shouted from the rooftops?

Because it goes against a lot of what many companies do these days.

These in particular stand out:

22. “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.”

11. “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”

10. “A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”

5. “We’ve never worried about numbers. In the marketplace, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. ... You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.”

#22 is important, as a lot of companies are more than willing to shovel crap out the door if it makes a profit, or they get into a market or market segment that they really shouldn't be in or that they are not fully committed to, and it bites them in the butt.

I've also seen a lot of companies over the years, tech and otherwise, that get in a slump, and all they can think about is keeping the stockholders happy and so they do layoffs and scale back spending in areas - R&D, etc., and the stockholders buy into that as being effective, and ultimately it comes back to haunt them. Too many companies focus on the next quarter, or the following quarter, and watching the stock price, when they should be thinking about the future a lot more. The stockholders share some of the blame though, for accepting quick layoffs or cuts in spending in key areas as a solution rather than taking a long term look.

I think #5 is relevant as well, because a lot of companies do focus too much on market share when they should be worried about the products themselves.

[dfwgator]

He does make the point...most companies today are in the business of making money, instead of being in the business of making things, the things to them are just a means to an end.

[cynwoody]

and given that he was a huge Clintonista (end result: Apples in every skool in America)

Apple was infiltrating schools long before Clinton.

As was IBM well before Apple, at the college level. They rented their mainframes to the future .edu's at cut rates, so that the students would learn on them and demand IBM when they got out into the world. Gotta eat the BUNCH's lunch, don't you know.

[MinorityRepublican]

The quote about Bill Gates is a good one, right on target. Had the boy taken acid once or twice, he wouldn’t be now running to Africa with mosquito nets, posturing politically to save the planet, or befriending the likes of Warren Buffett only because of the similarities between the numbers on their bottom lines. Sheesh!

Interesting....Steve Jobs already toured the Third World back in the '70s, and made his own conclusion.

[Revolting cat!]

How quaint, how old fashioned. It’s been said that the culprits of the money/costs focus have been elite business schools, and in particular Harvard and its graduate in the 40s Robert McNamara.

To focus on products and service these days is radical, and I’ve worked for companies, computer and otherwise, where CEOs who did just that were ousted and replaced by penny pinching doofi, who started out (and ended) with layoffs.

One such company, a software concern, was close to a $ billion in revenue, when it stumbled on a key product update, and the CEO co-founder who was promising to lead it to five billion in five years was ousted, replaced by one knocklehead then another, customers lost confidence in the company, it almost went broke, but the 2nd knocklehead finally reached a billion in a dozen years of penny pinching!

[BunnySlippers]

Who was Bill Gates for?

[cynwoody]

Andy Crouch, in his WSJ article, "Steve Jobs, the Secular Prophet," points out the difference between Jobs' hope, and that of the Christian. (FReeper thread here.)

Your link compares Eve's apple to Jobs's:

Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress. That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance.

jonathan mak

[cynwoody]

The quote about Bill Gates is a good one, right on target. Had the boy taken acid once or twice, he wouldn’t be now running to Africa with mosquito nets, posturing politically to save the planet, or befriending the likes of Warren Buffett only because of the similarities between the numbers on their bottom lines. Sheesh!

What the Dormouse Said
by John Markoff

He shows how almost every feature of today's home computers, from the graphical interface to the mouse control, can be traced to two Stanford research facilities that were completely immersed in the counterculture.