In Praise of Bad Steve
D.B. Grady:
When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big.
The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top.
“Those are air bubbles,” he snapped. “That means there’s space in there. Make it smaller.”
This comment on Hacker News really struck a chord with me:
I’ve worked briefly at Apple, but had only one face-to-face encounter with Steve. It was intensely scary. He was loved—LOVED—on the Apple campus. But he was also feared. And I felt that fear when I saw him. He was, and remains, the only person I’ve been genuinely “star struck” upon encountering. A lot of that was born of admiration, but just as much was born of terror.
In retrospect, I realized that I wasn’t really afraid of Steve. I was afraid of myself: my limitations, my shortcomings, my relative talent (or lack thereof), and my performance in life vis-a-vis my self-theorized potential. When I saw Steve Jobs in the flesh, I saw an embodiment of everything I was not, and probably never would be. Frankly, I felt like a fraud. I felt unworthy.
