The Problem With Cartoonish Summaries
Or, when success stories offer a kernel or truth but omit a much richer picture
đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
Managing money is always emotional.
Successful investing isnât about numbers and balance sheets â itâs about dopamine and serotonin.
One of the best ways to counter how much our brains work against us is to run our financial decisions by someone whoâs not in the same emotional state we are. That means NOT your spouse, your kids, or your co-workers if you own your employerâs stock.
What you are essentially looking for is someone who can say, âHave you ever thought of this âŚ?â when you tell them how you handle money. Someone who is able to view the situation more objectively than you ever could.
Enough talk! On to this weekâs essay. Itâs about 1,600 words.
One more thing. If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart above? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. đ
Q: Do successful people get more credit than they deserve?
Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parentsâ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the worldâs most valuable company.
Hereâs a brief rundown of the major events.
With the success of the Apple II, after Apple went public in 1978, Jobs was worth over $1 million (equivalent to $4.15 million in 2021) at age 23. By age 25, his net worth grew to an estimated $250 million (equivalent to $745 million in 2021).
He was also one of the youngest people ever to make the Forbes list of the nationâs richest people â and one of only a handful to have done it themselves, without inherited wealth.
In 1983, Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Appleâs CEO, asking, âDo you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?â
1984, Jobs introduced the Macintosh to a wildly enthusiastic audience at Appleâs annual shareholders meeting. However, its low performance and limited range of available software led to a rapid sales decline in the second half of 1984.
Sculleyâs and Jobsâs respective visions for Macintosh and the company greatly differed. In 1985, Sculley decided to reorganise Apple and proposed a plan that would remove Jobs from the Macintosh group. After a failed coup by Jobs to get rid of Sculley, Jobs decided to resign from Apple. Five additional senior Apple employees also resigned and joined Jobs in his new venture, NeXT, which Jobs founded with $7 million.
In 1988, The NeXT computer was shown to the world in what was considered Jobsâs comeback event. NeXT workstations were first released in 1990 and priced at $9,999 (equivalent to about $21,000 in 2021). The NeXT workstation was known for its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system.
The revised, second generation NeXTcube was released in 1990. Jobs touted it as the first âinterpersonalâ computer that would replace the personal computer. With its innovative NeXTMail multimedia email system, NeXTcube could share voice, image, graphics, and video in email for the first time.
Jobs ran NeXT with an obsession for aesthetic perfection, as evidenced by the development of and attention to NeXTcubeâs magnesium case.
This put considerable strain on NeXTâs hardware division, and in 1993, after having sold only 50,000 machines, NeXT transitioned fully to software development with the release of NeXTSTEP/Intel.
The company reported its first yearly profit of $1.03 million in 1994, and was acquired by Apple in 1997 for $400Â million, bringing Jobs back to the company he had cofounded, which was now struggling.
Jobs became named interim chief executive after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted. To concentrate Appleâs efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs terminated several projects, such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc.
Jobs worked closely with English designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the âThink differentâ advertising campaign and leading to the Apple Store, App Store (iOS), iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iTunes Store.
At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the âinterimâ modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO.
In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with the completely new Mac OS X (now known as macOS), based on NeXTâs NeXTSTEP platform.
In 1986, Jobs funded the spinout of The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilmâs computer graphics division for the price of $10 million. The first film produced by Pixar with its Disney partnership, Toy Story (1995), with Jobs credited as executive producer, brought financial success and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released.
In 2006, Jobs and Disneyâs new chief executive Bob Iger announced that Disney had agreed to purchase Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion. When the deal closed, Jobs became The Walt Disney Companyâs largest single shareholder with approximately seven percent of the companyâs stock.
Jobs has always been both admired and criticised for his consummate skill at persuasion and salesmanship, which has been dubbed the âreality distortion fieldâ and was particularly evident during his keynote speeches (colloquially known as Stevenotes) at Macworld Expos and at Apple Worldwide Developers Conferences.
Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing.
He thus belongs in the pantheon of Americaâs great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men were saints, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.
But, have you noticed that stories of great breakthroughs tend to coalesce around one person, one genius, and often one moment?
Those stories are fun to tell and easy to digest. Occasionally they are true. More often, they contain a kernel of truth, but omit a much richer and more interesting picture.
Today, letâs talk about success. More precisely, letâs ponder over why successful people are usually singled out and given too much credit, in fact all the credit, for whatever âgoodâ they have done, and the âsupporting actorsâ are completely ignored.
Isaac Newton, for example, is often celebrated for discovering universal gravity, explaining the motion of the planets, and inventing calculus.
But well before Newtonâs Principia, it was Johannes Kepler who first suggested the idea of a force from the sun driving the motion of the planets. It was Robert Hooke who first suggested a principle of universal gravity. It was Christiaan Huygens who showed that circular motion generates a centrifugal force. There were many who used Huygensâs law to derive the now-familiar form of gravity. It was Giovanni Borelli who explained the elliptical motion of Jupiterâs moons using gravitational forces. It was John Wallis and others who created the differential mathematics Newton used. And it was Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus in the form we use today. Newton indeed stood on the shoulders of giants, but that story is harder to tell than the apple falling on Newtonâs head.
Hooke suggested to Newton how gravity can explain planetary motion. Hookeâs suggestions launched Newton on the path to his masterpiece, Principia. Although Hooke suggested some of the initial ideas, he did not have the skills to create a complete system. Newton did. Newton was a great synthesiser, just as Jobs was.
Isaac Newton had Robert Hooke. Steve Jobs had Jef Raskin. Robert Hooke, in his spare time, designed bat-like flying wings, developed sprung shoes to bounce around London in twelve-foot-high leaps, and investigated the uses of marijuana (âthe patient understands not, nor remembereth any thing that he seeth ⌠yet is he very merryâ).
Jef Raskin, in his spare time, designed and built remote-controlled plane kits, taught harpsichord, conducted an opera company, and filed patents on packaging design. Like Hooke, Raskin was a bit of a dabbler.
In 1967, Raskin, then a 24-year-old engineer, submitted a PhD thesis arguing that computers should have graphical interfaces and that their usability was more important than their efficiency.
Both were radical ideas at the time, when monolithic mainframe computers dominated. In the early 1970s, Raskin ended up as a visiting researcher at Stanford and Xerox PARC. At PARC, he saw scientists create the first graphics-enabled personal computer, the Alto, with a bitmapped screen, a graphical interface, icons, and a mouse. PARC failed to commercialise any of those technologies
Raskin joined Apple in 1978, one year after Jobs and Wozniak started the company. Not long afterward, he launched a project to create an easy-to-use, inexpensive, graphics-enabled, small-footprint computer based on the Alto. He called it the Macintosh project.
Jobs and others at Apple tried to terminate the project, so Raskin encouraged them to visit Xerox PARC and see for themselves. They did and were converted. Eventually Jobs shoved Raskin aside and took over the project.
Raskin launched the original Macintosh project and suggested some of its core ideas to Jobs. But he did not have the skills to develop those ideas into a complete system. Jobs did. Jobs was a great synthesiser.
Newton and Jobs also treated their precursors in a similar fashion. Newton tried to crush Hooke and bury his contributions (including, allegedly, losing the only known portrait of him). Newton described Hooke, in language that stuck for three centuries, as âa man of strange, unsociable temper.â Jobs described Raskin as âa shithead who sucks.â
In an interview after Jobsâs death, Bill Gates said, âSteve and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the storyâs too complicated.â He added, âBut the difference between him and the next thousand isnât like, you know, God was born and he came down from the hill with the tablet.â
Gates may be mixing Jesus and Moses metaphors, but his point was clear.
The richer stories do more than just correct cartoonish summaries â Newton discovered gravity; Jobs created the Mac â or humanise deities. The richer stories help us understand how the forces of genius and serendipity come together to produce great breakthroughs.
The true histories, rather than the revisionist histories, contain the clues from which we learn how to make the forces of genius and serendipity work for us rather than against us.
But alas, very few are interested in writing or reading them.
Today I Learned
Bacteria are among the oldest living things on this planet and have been partying for billions of years.
They are the smallest things we can consider alive without getting a headache. If a cell were the size of a human, the average bacteria would be the size of a bunny.
Just like your own cells, bacteria are single-celled protein robots that come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and are guided by chemistry and their genetic code.
A common misconception about them is to think of them as primitive simply because they are smaller and less complex than our own cells.
But bacteria have been evolving for a long time and are exactly as complex as they need to be. And they are super successful on Earth!
Bacteria are masters of survival and can be found basically everywhere where nutrients are found. And where none can be found, they sometimes just start making their own by finding ways to eat radiation or other formerly indigestible things.
Bacteria saturate the soil you walk on, the surface of your desk, they float around in the air. They are on the screen you are reading right now. Some colonise the most hostile environments, like hydrothermal vents thousands of feet under the surface of the ocean, while others take on more pleasant places, like your eyelids.
There has been some controversy about how large the combined biomass of all bacteria on earth is, but according to even the most conservative estimate, bacteria have at least ten times more mass than all animals combined.
In one gram of soil, there are up to fifty million bacteria doing their thing. In one gram of the plaque on your teeth, more bacteria are living their life than there are humans on planet Earth right now.
In a pleasant environment, a single bacterium can reproduce once every twenty to thirty minutes by dividing into two bacteria. So after four more hours of dividing, there would already be 8,000 of them. A few more hours and there would be millions. And in a few more days, there would be enough bacteria to fill up the entirety of the worldâs oceans.
Luckily this math does not quite work in reality because there is neither the space nor the nutrients. And not all species of bacteria can replicate this quickly, but this is what would technically be possible.
Timeless Insight
A very useful thing you can do for your career is to not reflexively buy into the lie that caring about money means that you are a mercenary, not mission-focused, not a culture fit.
Recognise that youâve been manipulated into that lie by the very people who care a lot about money.
The key is to consider the question âI care about money, but over what timeframe?â It is advantageous to have a longer term outlook on money, not the âI did this work today, where are my million dollarsâ attitude.
Many people these days have just been brainwashed into âonly the mission mattersâ, which is wrong.
What Iâm Reading
Most adults find it hard to be playful â no doubt because they have to take care of all the responsibilities that come with an adultâs life. Creative adults, however, have not forgotten how to play.
â John Cleese, Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide
Tiny Thought
The path only appears straight when we look back at it. On the way, we all feel lost.
Before You GoâŚ
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek đ