I've seen this kind of strange behavior elsewhere with less famous people who are in charge of companies.
People who don't regularly interact with them seem to act strange around them (which isn't that surprising if they're not seen that often and they're in charge), but the weirder thing to me is that all the supporting staff around the leader also acts strangely and seems to make it worse.
It reminds me of the story when Carmack had a demo and one of Jobs' support staff said they couldn't use it because "he doesn't like blood". When Jobs heard it was Carmack he said it was fine.
> When Jobs heard it was Carmack he said it was fine.
That seems less like the kind of "aura of reverence" you're talking about, and more like a respect for another creative person who makes carefully-considered choices (and perhaps a knowledge that most people in the audience for the demo know the artist and also respect them.)
Even if you don't agree with someone's tastes, if those tastes are a coherent part of a polished work, and you value the work itself, then you'll tend to let your aesthetic disagreement slide.
For a different concrete example: when the average movie director puts a weird sex thing in their movie, it sticks out in a way that makes you wonder whether they have a fetish and wanted to indulge it—and that breaks the verisimilitude of the work, lessening its impact. If, on the other hand, a director like David Lynch puts a weird sex thing in their movie, it's usually a critical element that fits the tone of the work, and doesn't break verisimilitude at all. It doesn't really matter whether David Lynch likes a given weird sex thing; it would still be a part of the work even if he didn't, because it belongs there.
Blood belongs in Carmack's games, in a way that means you'll tend to appreciate the bloodiness for its contribution to the overall tone of the game, even if you don't like blood.
Yeah that makes sense to me - my comment was more about how the support staff acted like "oh we can't do that - he wouldn't like that" when it turned out to be totally fine when interacting with him directly.
I'm not sure if that's a thing with Jobs and people being afraid of him, but I've seen similar stuff where people around the person act like they're delicate or everything requires special consideration when interacting with the leader.
The story is that Jobs was put off by Carmack's t-shirt (a smiley face with a bloody bullet hole in it). But they had a discussion, Carmack was critical of some of Apple's technical decisions, and Jobs listened and ultimately took Carmack's side. Jobs then yelled at one of his senior engineers.
When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo.
I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with:
“I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.”
It would only annoy me if the author was being untruthful or disingenuous. Unless you have reason to suspect otherwise, I'll assume the author's personal recollection of his experiences as sincere.
Or to be more blunt, he knew Steve personally and you didn't. Just because you have never met someone who garnered that kind of reaction from you doesn't mean such people don't exist.
It's not a matter of the experience itself, it's a matter of how you make sense of it. I don't doubt that the author felt as though he had to act a certain way around Jobs, but the way that he writes about it sounds like he was dealing with a king or something. Re-read this part of the post:
"When demoing something to Steve, you had to pace yourself. If Steve said, “Stop,” you fucking stopped. Hands down and waited. And you didn’t jiggle the cursor while he was looking at the screen. Certain death.
If he wanted to drive the demo machine then, by God, you let him drive.
And if your software crashed, you didn’t make excuses. You just made damn sure that particular scenario didn’t happen again. Ever."
> Or to be more blunt, he knew Steve personally and you didn't. Just because you have never met someone who garnered that kind of reaction from you doesn't mean such people don't exist.
I claim that no one (that I've known for a long time) would ever make me feel this way because I make a point to "kill my idols" as they say. The author of this post didn't do that and that's what I find annoying.
That seems to be the case with a lot of super charismatic leaders. Somehow these people can instill an extreme level of loyalty in people they meet.
I don't want to compare Jobs to Hitler but when you read accounts from people who worked with Hitler they also had this sense of loyalty they couldn't overcome even while knowing that something was going wrong. Reagan may be another case.
He told Wozniak that they had made $500 on a sale but in reality it was 5000 and he kept the rest. He refused to recognize his daughter for along time. He refused to give stock options to a lot of very early employees. Wozniak then made a up for it.
He was a jerk. Especially the story about his daughter is plain evil. At some point you have to take responsibility for your actions.
Because the majority of the coverage about him has been praiseworthy, given his business success. Now that he's dead, criticism of him will come off as axe-grinding and bitter.
I think it's good show all facets of famous people, especially their dark sides. There is a tendency to glorify them and then think they are great people in all areas. Most times they aren't.
Absolutely. You see the same thing with Musk as well. Someone aptly compared the level of fervorous awe some air-quotes "visionary" leaders inspire, with evangelical mega-pastors.
People who don't regularly interact with them seem to act strange around them (which isn't that surprising if they're not seen that often and they're in charge), but the weirder thing to me is that all the supporting staff around the leader also acts strangely and seems to make it worse.
It reminds me of the story when Carmack had a demo and one of Jobs' support staff said they couldn't use it because "he doesn't like blood". When Jobs heard it was Carmack he said it was fine.
Something about it feels weird.