I think learning to focus and tune certain things out is a skill like any other, that anyone can learn to a degree. Admittedly I haven't made much progress here either, but I think that with practice it becomes easier.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree with your idea about changing your environment. This is the single easiest thing I've found that helps me focus. Of course, there's always still the rest of the Internet...
Well, ok. I suppose anecdotal samples are not the best evidence for either side. I'd like to imagine that most artists are relatively well-adjusted.
Anyway, that's the kind of world I'd like to live in. Everyone can (and should) be an artist to some degree. While I do agree with the fairly obvious point that some people are more talented than others, I reject the idea that there are "genius artists", spikes of talent on an otherwise smooth talent-graph.
Windows 1.0 came out in 1985, only one year after the Apple Macintosh. PARC invented the idea of the WIMP GUI, not Apple. I think it's a little silly to say that the idea would have died within PARC.
I don't agree with the idea of the "mad artist," an elite diamond-in-the-rough character who cloisters himself away on manic episodes of hyper-creativity, becomes an alcoholic, and emerges with a genius piece of Art.
Art is a slog. Artists are the ones with enough endurance to churn out shit day after day, refining the best of what they produce. The best artists are social, because that's where the most ideas flow freely.
Most artists I know (writers, musicians, graphic artists) are like this. Perpetuating the myth of the great lone genius is elitist, which is a discriminatory and dangerous ideology.
I think the difference is that the technologies Steve was so instrumental in creating were already being developed without him. The GUI and personal computer were pretty much already there, he just got to it earliest. Without him these things would have been created in just about the same time span with little difference.
This is distinct from, say, Einstein's theory of relativity, which was a solution from a direction which no one was looking. Everything Steve helped create was already underway.
I think one important reason for a debate like this is that the leaders we choose as role models defines the direction we move as a culture. It's a moral question we're debating (or that we should be debating) - is it better to emulate Steve's leadership, or someone else's?
Shrinking from normative discussions like this is essentially abandoning the idea that there is any moral dimension to technology, which is more dangerous than any side you can take in the debate.
There is a difference, of course, between meaningful discussion and fanboyism. But whether or not Steve is worthy of the praise he has is definitely worth discussing.
Pretty similar to my workflow, but why do you destroy the box after every session? `vagrant up` on my laptop takes a few minutes at least to build and provision a vagrant machine.
Usually I just use `vagrant suspend`. Seconds vs minutes. Time > organization IMHO.
That said, I wholeheartedly agree with your idea about changing your environment. This is the single easiest thing I've found that helps me focus. Of course, there's always still the rest of the Internet...