That's true, but I think it's true because that's what his fanbase wants him to be.
I always got the impression that Steve was projecting his customers' projections of what they wanted to be themselves. He's cool, he's likeable, he's barefoot on stage. He makes flashy, shiny products and lives comfortably as a result.
I wonder how much of Apple's success is due to a younger crowd saying, "hell yeah! If Steve can do it, I can do it!" and then going out to buy Apple products in the subconscious hope that some of Steve's success will rub off on them.
Steve Jobs seems to me to be constantly saying, "hey, you hep cats! I'm livin' the dream, and you can, too! Buy an iPod to remind yourself of this fact!" It's an interesting combination of Cult of Personality and Sympathetic Magic.
It's fun. When I was 16, my dad bought a 50% stake in an actual gold mine in northern Idaho. We spent the summer mining for gold--after we spent a few weeks getting the neglected mine up and running again.
My dad and brother would go underground and do the actual digging; my mom and I stayed topside, with me running the hoist and the both of us working the sluice box.
I found a nugget as big as my thumb that year. We found a number of smaller nuggets as well.
Two years before, my dad had a placer claim for a stretch of creek about 10 miles from the mine just described, and we spent all summer out in the woods, dredging and panning for gold. Didn't find anything, though.
I'm in the same boat. The deadline is everything. I structure my life around my deadlines, and the closer I get to the deadline, the more everything else ends up playing second fiddle to it.
I'm an illustrator, though, not a programmer. But it's nice to be able to tell new clients that I haven't missed a deadline in 15 years. No illness or injury or real-life event can change that.
I used to feel guilty for sometimes waiting till the last minute to finish a job, until I watched a documentary about Frank Frazetta. He would get a new painting project and wait till the night before the deadline before even starting on it.
He'd stay up all night and get it done on time, then go back to what he was doing--which was usually baseball or (as he got older) golf. :)
>"You know all those stupid quiz apps on Facebook/fart apps on iPhone? Well, I don't make those, but I try to make more useful stuff on Facebook/iPhone, like X, Y and Z".
Hey...I like that! Let's see if it works for me...
Me: "You know all those bickering nerds who draw the same webcomic about two roommates obsessed with video games, a talking appliance and/or robot, a pet who wants to take over the world, and slacker/stoner Jesus? Yeah. I don't make those comics."
The only problem in this guy's life is his mentality.
He gets almost $200K handed to him and decides he wants to be an author? Great! But he's going about it all wrong.
Move out of the city, man! Find a nice country home. Ditch the Blackberry and all the other tech toys. Sell the suits. Stop spending money needlessly on train rides, eating out, and all that other nonsense. He's still trying to live his old lifestyle. It makes no sense at all.
Buy yourself a cheap laptop, get a basic package from your local ISP, install OpenOffice so you have a word processor for your writing, save your pennies, grow and cook your own food, and write!
Geez, I probably shouldn't armchair-quarterback other people's lives this early in the morning, but....
I still have two A500+ machines, one of which has a 42MB external HD with this program on it. :)
I did a 192-frame, full-color animation in DPIV back around 1996. Took me five days to finish. Still trying to figure out how to migrate it to my XP box.
I'm an old metal fan, but going back to college gave me a taste for this kind of stuff.
Hands In The Air is spot-on. It's my favorite. You've got good story-telling skills, which isn't common in music nowadays. And the guitar work is great!
Question, though:
How on earth do you keep it together on stage when people are talking and girls are cackling in the audience during your whole performance? That would totally blow my concentration.
> It will take as long as it takes, doing what it takes, but it's the only approach that works.
And that right there was my first big mistake. I'd jump into an art career half-assed, and if it didn't take off like a rocket in six months, I'd put it aside and collect a Day Job paycheck. As a result, I'm pushing 40 and my art is at a stage right now where it should've been fifteen years ago.
But I didn't stick with it, and all that time is wasted time now. I listened to people who didn't understand a thing about art, and measured my success by the "get rich quick and get a Hollywood deal!" crap that everyone thinks is the true measure of success. I fucked it up and missed out on all those years of working every day to get better. Right now, I'm scrambling as fast as I can to catch up.
Those of you in your 20s, let me say this: If there's something you can't stop thinking about--whether it's art, music, coding, or whatever--then just do it. Even if you suck at it right now, it's better to get all the suckitude out of your system now, while you're young, so that by the time you're my age, you've put all that behind you and your craft is nice and polished.
Hook me up with a link to your music, man! I wanna hear it. If it's something that jives with my artwork, I'd be willing to give you a free plug. If you'd like to reciprocate, let me know.
Currently, I'm creating a comic and related artwork for that niche of people who are tired of all-ages, family-friendly nonsense. The comic's NSFW, but it's nothing racier than you'd find in an old copy of Heavy Metal.
You'll wanna read it from the beginning, or it'll make no sense. TOC link is towards the top, under the banner and above the nav buttons.
And good luck with your music career! I've always wanted to make music, but have no talent for it. I live vicariously through all my musician friends. :)
Speaking as a Starving Artist, I've noticed that part of the problem lies in artists trying to achieve success by aping corporate methods, which rarely work for an individual artist. I did that for awhile, and it got me absolutely nowhere.
There's also this attitude (in the US, at least) that you're a failure if you're not instantly successful. Rare is the artist who takes the time to build a solid foundation of fans/patrons. You're going to eat a lot of ramen in those years, but the base you build will be solid enough to build a house on.
It also helps to be unflaky. The article mentions artists as being elitists at least once, and that's an unfortunate stereotype. It's a stereotype you have to fight against in the minds of your fans, and you've got to fight it in yourself sometimes, too.
I'm still poor--by standard American standards. However, I live in a 4-bedroom house with a bedroom all to myself as a studio. I have cable internet, A/C, two cars, and a couple different computers--one for working on and another which serves as a file server for the studio.
It's slow and it's grueling, but it's making me a better, healthier person. Making your own bread (for example) is not only cheaper, it's better for you. And the stupid impulse purchases I made when I had a Day Job are no more. I sold off many of the things which were cluttering up my house just because I bought them on a whim. My credit cards are used only in emergencies, and are always paid up ASAP.
I'm currently working on $650 worth of private commissions. Ten years ago, that meant that I'd be doing 12 projects at the same time. However, after taking the time to work up a rock-solid fanbase, I can happily say that the $650 is coming from only three different projects.
Now, if that sort of thing could be a little more regular...but that's the preconceived notions talking again.
It's a rollercoaster ride, but it sure beats all the years I spent answering the phones in my tech support Day Job. :)
When I took art classes in college, I was eternally frustrated. Every instructor would parrot a variant of, "here's what you should do to be a good artist, but remember: art can't really be taught because it's all subjective." And that drove me nuts. It was as if everyone teaching art just admitted that they didn't know how to teach art, but they were still more than happy to take my tuition money. As an artist who loves science, that just wasn't enough for me.
After reading this article, a bunch of critical and much-needed things effortlessly dropped into place. Thanks!
Just installed it--I was curious to see how they handled the image sizing. As an artist, nothing bugs me more than other people's lack of consideration for the aspect ratio of the original art.
I'm happy to say that nothing was stretched or otherwise mangled in order to fit in the ad space. Looks like they use a little cropping, but that's about it.
Indeed. It seems like I trip over one of these "it's easier than ever for the kids to be haxors nowadays! You gotta think like The Bad Guy to stay ahead of them! But we will, so keep giving us security money!" articles about every 18 months or so.
There's a car analogy here; let's see if I can do it right, considering I just woke up 20 minutes ago.
Before WWII, the automobile was something a fair amount of people owned, but didn't do much with by way of "hacking". The real automotive hacking was done to just keep the damn thing running and reliable.
Post WWII is when the kids of the day started hacking their cars to build hot rods, and they did it to get girls and show off. Most of them, though, tweaked their hardware and horsepower simply to see how far they could push the machine.
By the '60s, hot rods had evolved into muscle cars. Horsepower purists were applying what they knew about hacking the previous generation of automotive technology to the next generation, and managed to Frankenstein a whole new animal--some of these cars could get you killed if you didn't know what you were doing.
Detroit took notice. Fifteen-plus years of kids hacking their engines defined a trend--a trend which said, "give me more horsepower!" Chrysler, in particular, took this to heart and made the Barracuda barely street legal right off the assembly line. All it took was a few small tweaks to turn your showroom car into a full-blown monster of a muscle car.
Chevys took a little more work, but the replacement parts required were dirt cheap, and remained so for a very long time.
By the 80s (or thereabouts) imports were gaining a foothold in the American market, and the muscle car was slowly being phased out for the Ricer. It didn't help that the cars which used to be so easily modified were now rolling off the assembly line with computers under the hood.
Nowadays, cars aren't nearly as easy to tweak as they once were, partly because of the computers, but mostly because they now come with most of the tweaks pre-installed. So, what you get nowadays are the old, die-hard muscle car enthusiasts (who have been pushed well out of the spotlight), the "I live my life a quarter-mile at a time" Ricer morons (who tweak their car with ridiculous body kits and the occasional nitrous oxide bottle, rather than any meaningful auto hack) and the crazy, wild-eyed guy who lives 20 miles out of town and spends his weekends trying to get his old Accord to give him 100 miles per gallon.
The hot-rod kids are still out there, they're just older, wiser and overshadowed by the Fast and the Furious.
When this series first came to PBS, I was 10 years old. It was easily the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen. Absolutely magical--if I can use such a word to define something so scientific.
I'm currently saving my pennies for that 7-disc set for sale on Amazon.
That's true, but I think it's true because that's what his fanbase wants him to be.
I always got the impression that Steve was projecting his customers' projections of what they wanted to be themselves. He's cool, he's likeable, he's barefoot on stage. He makes flashy, shiny products and lives comfortably as a result.
I wonder how much of Apple's success is due to a younger crowd saying, "hell yeah! If Steve can do it, I can do it!" and then going out to buy Apple products in the subconscious hope that some of Steve's success will rub off on them.
Steve Jobs seems to me to be constantly saying, "hey, you hep cats! I'm livin' the dream, and you can, too! Buy an iPod to remind yourself of this fact!" It's an interesting combination of Cult of Personality and Sympathetic Magic.