Difference

I was amused by a couple of comments I read in the wake of Steve Jobs’ passing.

One was Barack Obama’s comment: “By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.”

Well, like Obama himself, Jobs’ biological father was not American-born. His father was Syrian, someone who immigrated to the United States when he was still a young man. If he had tried to do so after 9/11, Homeland Security might have frowned on it. Or the anti-immigration laws that have been sprouting in various parts of the United States might have blocked it.

If so, there would have been no Steve Jobs. If so, there would not have been the one person who exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. Obama might have used that to prove the folly of America turning its back on the one thing that made it strong—its being a melting pot, its being a country of immigrants.

Two was Jobs himself twitting Bill Gates by saying, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” But of course Gates was never the driving force behind the digital revolution, Jobs was. Would Gates have managed to broaden his mind, enough to accomplish a fraction of what Jobs did, if he dropped acid or visited an ashram? Probably not, but he might have enjoyed the trip, one way or the other.

That comment though holds a clue to what constitutes genius. It’s the combination of circumstance and talent.

The talent is the more obvious element. To say that Jobs had talent is to say that Thomas Edison had talent. Theirs are levels of creativity and inventiveness that leave the world gaping in awe. Jobs’ comparison to Thomas Edison is richly deserved. Both have wrought changes upon the world that have made the before and after look like B.C. and A.D. And Jobs probably has the advantage of being the more artistic. Obama was right to say that Jobs didn’t just make information accessible, he made it fun.

Edison was just being cute when he said genius was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Gates can perspire all he wants and he’ll still underwhelm. The perspiration of course is necessary, Jobs was as much a hard worker as Edison. But they had something more, which is what separates the genius from the merely talented. They had imagination. That is not the capacity to give the right answers, that is the capacity to ask the right questions. You can always give the right answers to the wrong questions and leave the world no better for it. But you can always give the wrong answers to the right questions and still change the world.

“What if?” is the question geniuses normally ask. Jobs asked quite a lot of that.

Circumstance is the less obvious element, but it’s just as essential. It’s simply not true that genius will thrive under any circumstance. The stoutest seed needs the most fertile ground to flourish.

You don’t have to take Jobs’ comments about LSD and ashram literally, although some people, including scientists, have been trying to make a case for the first. John Lennon too thought the drug helped expand the range of his consciousness. But in both their cases, it wasn’t just that, it was the whole culture in which they lived that pushed their thinking beyond boundaries. That tends to be forgotten in the various paeans that have been heaped on Jobs. He has been called a brilliant innovator, entrepreneur and inventor. He was all that of course, but he was more. He was a visionary, and his vision was born of his time.

He would complain later that the people he worked with, who did not share his “countercultural roots,” could not understand him. The “counterculture” of the 1960s, the daring to think differently, which became Apple’s motto, did not just produce the Beatles and Woodstock (Jobs was a big fan of the former, and of Bob Dylan), the hippie communes and the protest movement (Jobs had a fling with Joan Baez, the folk singer and civil rights activist), it also produced the small community of nerds that would soon spark the digital revolution.

Those nerds had an interesting theory in the early ’70s, which was that the revolution of the ’60s failed because while people knew where they wanted to go, they did not have the means to get there. Specifically, the revolution had no backbone or infrastructure. That backbone was going to be the personal computer. It would bring information to everyone. It would democratize everything.

Alas, as they would soon find out, the Empire has a way of striking back, or co-opting things. Rather than democratizing information, the computer revolution created an information gap between the have (access) and have-not.

Be that as it may, it did not prevent the pioneers from clinging to their “countercultural roots,” some more than others. Their successors, who did not share those roots, would later water it down to sartorial displays of “casual chic” in the workplace: T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. True enough, Bill Gates could have done with more than that.

But in the end, it’s ironic that Jobs himself has been transformed despite his being the very antithesis of it into an orthodox icon who epitomized core American values. A brilliant businessman who made Apple the most successful company on the planet, a shrewd strategist who bought and sold Pixar for a fortune, an innovator who gave the world things it never knew it needed. Someone the Tea Party might pat on the back. Someone who might as well have preached, “Think closed,” “Think generic,” “Think paranoid.”

That is not Jobs’ legacy. Nor indeed is it just the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad. It is what they represent. “Think differently” was what he preached. Differently was how he lived.

And it made all the difference.