Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, by Dan Lyons. I read this in its entirety today. I’m thinking about how I conduct myself, how I communicate with others. In some oblique ways, Fake Steve’s internal monologues about cruelty, power, “focus” (i.e., complete self-absorption), and being a sociopath were a helpful addition to my own internal conversations. But maybe no more than every input becomes part of whatever I’m thinking hard about. I’ve been cruel recently, when I didn’t need to be. I’ve been trying to focus, with variable success. Yes, like Fake Steve, I think of myself as a person who just wants to be left alone to create beautiful things. That is, boiled down, exactly what I want. Sorry if that makes anyone think a thing about me. Rarely do I have the guts to follow that through as far as I theoretically could. Often my concern about coming off as an asshole, or (put differently) my concern for other’s needs and interests — which is powerful — can put me in a holding pattern where I neglect my work because I’m afraid someone will need me and I won’t be available. I won’t put on headphones, on the off chance someone cries out for help (or any less-serious reason) and I won’t be able to hear them. Then I can swing the other way, and concentrate so hard on myself and what I’m doing that I lose track of other people for months or years at a time. Neither of these totally works, but then neither, apparently, is aiming for the straight center. For straight-line balance. I’ve spent much of the last few years talking about and seeking Balance. When I was in the seventh grade I began a story called “Balance,” a medieval-fantasy story in the style I was insatiably reading at the time. I can’t remember the characters or the plot — the real meat was in the “magic system,” the philosophical underpinning of the story, the thing that differentiates many of that kind of book and provides hooks for the plot. Rand Al’Thor turns inward to reach the True Source, the One Power, and weaves reality to suit his purposes; Gaborn val Orden (I think?) must accept the gifts of other people’s abilities, must brand himself with another man’s strength, or metabolism, while the giver falls crippled and weak, or goes into an antimetabolic stasis, frozen in undeath. The guy in Wizard’s First Rule has to like Ayn Rand to get his sword to turn white. Or something. In my story, each person has an internal scale; most people visualize it as Mind vs. Body, and think that you can be strong but not smart, or that you can be bookish but must sacrifice physical prowess. Most people live with a tipped scale, and talk about balance but never achieve it. That idea reflected my observations of the world up to that point, and haven’t entirely been overturned in the years since. It’s the classic jock vs. nerd dichotomy which plays out in countless guises. Or maybe the ur-dichotomy, the very Form ideal of dichotomy, etc.et.c.eta.et.c.e. whatever. People could get by just fine with one side of their scale clunked down with weight, but it was healthier to be somewhere in the middle. Some people added a third pan to their visualization of the scale, a tripartite balancing act that was much more difficult to maintain. The third weight was Spirit, or Soul, or whatever each individual wanted to call it. In order to safely increase that Mass, the Mind and Body needed to be kept in harmony, because an equal size weight of Spirit had much greater Mass than just Mind or Body, and could throw off a person’s equilibrium and lead to madness, death, fanaticism, or other ills. For example, a person who cultivated their Spirit but had way more Mind than Body would find their thoughts twisted into believing that their body was evil, that it was the source of evil thought and of sin, and might flog themselves or fast or otherwise punish/neglect themselves physically, which over time just threw off the scale even further, and led to some pretty fucked-up individuals. All of this was roughly concocted at about age 14, and it’s interesting that I was still going to church and praying and all that, but developing these views about the spiritual life that are either much more cynical or much more Eastern-influenced than I would have considered myself at that time. So, anyway, it would need to be developed further to actually work in a story, or maybe kept rough and interpolatable (yipes!)… and there may have been another scale or something eventually. If I were writing it now, it would be revealed eventually that the Mind and Body weights were actually just one, or that the whole Scale after a while was a figment, whatever. The big thing was, only when balanced, when the “sides” of the self stopped warring, could the Spirit be developed, and only when the Spirit (or the Self) was making progress could truly incredible feats be achieved. For example, superhuman feats of strength could be achieved by reapportioning the Masses so that Body had more, but overall the person was still Balanced. Perhaps telepathy or other magical effects could be achieved by distributing the Mass to Mind. Obviously, this idea is still fresh for me, and I’ve never really let it go. It’s actually come to influence me a great deal, or it sprung from some deep central beam inside me. I’ve been obsessed with balance — with my swings from social to anti-, from productive to fallow, and in trying to achieve some kind of middle ground where I could be healthier on a constant basis. Something more akin to oscillation than real balance has been much more of a theme, but that central ground has always been a focus. Maybe I’m just swinging back from one extreme, maybe I just haven’t been doing a good job of balancing — but I’m feeling now that the middle ground isn’t cutting it for me. I’m doing a lot of hedging and tip-toeing to stay balanced, and either I’m not effectively applying everything I’ve learned (entirely possible), or my balance-point is actually somewhere besides where I’ve planted the fulcrum (almost definitely true). Or maybe balance isn’t really an effective way to approach a life. Who knows? All of that to say: I don’t want to be Steve Jobs. Definitely not Fake Steve. It’s not who I am. But am I a lot more like him than I usually allow myself to think? This article by John Siracusa which I read a couple of months ago has been on my mind a lot. Especially where he says: “But the real turning point for me came with the onset of puberty and its accompanying compulsive self-analysis. I realized that I owed what success I had as an artist not to any specific art-related aptitude, but rather to a more general and completely orthogonal skill. Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that’s in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that’s in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.” I used to copy other people’s drawings in exacting detail. Ask me to show you the Spider-Man notebook sometime. And while I’ve slowly developed the ability to draw from my own mind, for the most part I’m good at drawing something I can see and just doing it until it’s right. Often correcting “errors” in the original. A lot of what qualifies me to be “designer,” if I am, is that I hate it when things look wrong. And I’ll arrange something until it (mostly) stops looking broken. The weird thing there is, I also hate if something has been done before. Which means that, while I notice when something looks wrong, I’m also noticing when things look right but are just following the rules. Especially if I’m just following rules I’ve set up for myself. Which makes developing a personal aesthetic or style something of a contradiction, and while at any given time I’ve had things I liked best, I don’t know what, if anything, is part of my style. And if I notice something is becoming stylistically consistent, I have a desire to break it and find something new. Which is exhausting. Emily once told me that the hardest thing about being friends with me was even considering the possibility that I might be judging her anywhere near as harshly as I judged myself. I didn’t know what to make of that, exactly, and I think in the four years since she told me that, I’ve developed entirely the wrong responses to it. Which is to say: I’ve stopped holding myself to the same standards of quality and freshness, while at the same time doling out more of that judgment to the people around me. Especially recently, I’ve become much more rule-oriented and design-standards-concerned, and have been a lot more cynical and harsh about the general shittiness of the designed world and a lot less optimistic about my ability to do anything to reinvigorate it. I’ve also been more prone to cut down other people and the things they like, which is something that stems from being, in some ways, less personally satisfied. Which is weird, because in some ways the last two months have been some of the most productive of my life. … Well, August and most of September were. Since the end of September I’ve been producing less, and all it takes is a week or two of stagnance to put me in a foul mood. The balance, as it were, is delicate. Maybe too delicate. Something I’ve been trying to keep in mind. So then, long-windedly, I must consider what has led to my being less productive, if anything. There’s always the threat of laziness, or wanting to take it easy for a bit. The sense of a job well done deserving a reward. That’s important; if I work hard for a few days, I want to take a day off. And, at least for the last two+ weeks, I think that’s what’s been missing: I haven’t just taken a god damn day or two off. “Day off” meaning one of near-complete solitude. In the comfort of my home, usually with a good video game and some podcasts and music. I enjoy travel, I enjoy meeting with friends, I enjoy good solid work — but nothing refreshes me like a day in my chair with Dragon Quarter and You Look Nice Today and absolutely no other concerns. And I’ve been well aware of that, for weeks, but I haven’t taken it. I’ve had opportunity. But I haven’t done it. As a result, I haven’t been fully concentrating on anything else, either. Frankly, I am aware this makes me something of a diva. Or: an entity with parameters and calibration needs of which I’m becoming aware. Also Frankly: fuck you if you don’t like it. I care about a lot of things, and a lot of people, but the thing I care about most, the thing I’ve been most interested in for as long as I can remember, is “operating at my best and producing beautiful things.” A conjuncted entity with inextricable parts. It’s the only thing that really gives me pleasure, and the only thing that, without it, I’m completely unable to enjoy anything else. El Jobso bases almost all of his decisions on whether or not an activity puts him in a good state for creativity. And, as appalling as most of the Dictator for Life’s behavior was, every SINGLE time he talked about creating beautiful things and not having time for the other “bullshit” (such as the possibility of indictment over backdated stock options), the tuning fork in my chest resonated violently. So the flipping sides of a current problem: I haven’t been doing enough work. I haven’t been resting enough. I’ve been in what could probably be termed a fairly balanced position, where the masses on all sides are fairly small. The trick of the Balance system I invented years ago was that, in order to add more and more Mass to the whole system, the entirety had to advance together. A person could only get so strong while neglecting their mind before they reached a limit of tolerance. But if a person’s Mind, Body and Spirit were all advancing together, the total capacity could increase without end. And that’s the crux of what I was reaching for all those years ago, and still reach for: forward movement. Constant improvement. New frontiers of capability and activity. The most important thing for Fake Steve is that he completely owns his egomania. And for any of us (but, honestly, just for me because I can’t proscribe anything for anyone else and usually when I do they get hurt), I think the most important thing may be to know what it is you want, and to be unashamed of proceeding toward it. To be uninhibited by yourself or others. And to foremost be honest about what that objective really is. And then: To Live It. Wholly. Unrelentingly. As much as you’re able. As much as I’m able. … Further from Mr. Siracusa: “Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it’s presented in large doses. It’s impolite. It’s unnecessarily obsessive. It’s just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what’s wrong with it to begin with. This character flaw, this curse, this seemingly most useless of skills is actually the yin to the more widely recognized yang of creative talent. Is a preternatural ability to find fault enough on its own to make something great? Probably not, but it can help amplify mundane competencies and produce results well beyond what you could have achieved with your creative skills alone. No, we can’t all be Steve Jobs, but there’s room in life for both the grand and the prosaic. Every day is a new chance to do something a little bit better (“I am the Steve Jobs of this sandwich!”), to find something wrong with what you’re doing and understand it well enough to know how to fix it.” … The book’s also reasonably funny, in a pop culture sort of way. I’d say it was informative, but I have no idea which portions were real, and which speculative. Mostly enjoyable. Three and three-quarter stars.

Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, by Dan Lyons.

I read this in its entirety today. I’m thinking about how I conduct myself, how I communicate with others. In some oblique ways, Fake Steve’s internal monologues about cruelty, power, “focus” (i.e., complete self-absorption), and being a sociopath were a helpful addition to my own internal conversations. But maybe no more than every input becomes part of whatever I’m thinking hard about.

I’ve been cruel recently, when I didn’t need to be. I’ve been trying to focus, with variable success. Yes, like Fake Steve, I think of myself as a person who just wants to be left alone to create beautiful things. That is, boiled down, exactly what I want. Sorry if that makes anyone think a thing about me.

Rarely do I have the guts to follow that through as far as I theoretically could. Often my concern about coming off as an asshole, or (put differently) my concern for other’s needs and interests — which is powerful — can put me in a holding pattern where I neglect my work because I’m afraid someone will need me and I won’t be available. I won’t put on headphones, on the off chance someone cries out for help (or any less-serious reason) and I won’t be able to hear them. Then I can swing the other way, and concentrate so hard on myself and what I’m doing that I lose track of other people for months or years at a time. Neither of these totally works, but then neither, apparently, is aiming for the straight center. For straight-line balance.

I’ve spent much of the last few years talking about and seeking Balance. When I was in the seventh grade I began a story called “Balance,” a medieval-fantasy story in the style I was insatiably reading at the time. I can’t remember the characters or the plot — the real meat was in the “magic system,” the philosophical underpinning of the story, the thing that differentiates many of that kind of book and provides hooks for the plot. Rand Al’Thor turns inward to reach the True Source, the One Power, and weaves reality to suit his purposes; Gaborn val Orden (I think?) must accept the gifts of other people’s abilities, must brand himself with another man’s strength, or metabolism, while the giver falls crippled and weak, or goes into an antimetabolic stasis, frozen in undeath. The guy in Wizard’s First Rule has to like Ayn Rand to get his sword to turn white. Or something.

In my story, each person has an internal scale; most people visualize it as Mind vs. Body, and think that you can be strong but not smart, or that you can be bookish but must sacrifice physical prowess. Most people live with a tipped scale, and talk about balance but never achieve it. That idea reflected my observations of the world up to that point, and haven’t entirely been overturned in the years since. It’s the classic jock vs. nerd dichotomy which plays out in countless guises. Or maybe the ur-dichotomy, the very Form ideal of dichotomy, etc.et.c.eta.et.c.e. whatever. People could get by just fine with one side of their scale clunked down with weight, but it was healthier to be somewhere in the middle.

Some people added a third pan to their visualization of the scale, a tripartite balancing act that was much more difficult to maintain. The third weight was Spirit, or Soul, or whatever each individual wanted to call it. In order to safely increase that Mass, the Mind and Body needed to be kept in harmony, because an equal size weight of Spirit had much greater Mass than just Mind or Body, and could throw off a person’s equilibrium and lead to madness, death, fanaticism, or other ills. For example, a person who cultivated their Spirit but had way more Mind than Body would find their thoughts twisted into believing that their body was evil, that it was the source of evil thought and of sin, and might flog themselves or fast or otherwise punish/neglect themselves physically, which over time just threw off the scale even further, and led to some pretty fucked-up individuals.

All of this was roughly concocted at about age 14, and it’s interesting that I was still going to church and praying and all that, but developing these views about the spiritual life that are either much more cynical or much more Eastern-influenced than I would have considered myself at that time.

So, anyway, it would need to be developed further to actually work in a story, or maybe kept rough and interpolatable (yipes!)… and there may have been another scale or something eventually. If I were writing it now, it would be revealed eventually that the Mind and Body weights were actually just one, or that the whole Scale after a while was a figment, whatever. The big thing was, only when balanced, when the “sides” of the self stopped warring, could the Spirit be developed, and only when the Spirit (or the Self) was making progress could truly incredible feats be achieved. For example, superhuman feats of strength could be achieved by reapportioning the Masses so that Body had more, but overall the person was still Balanced. Perhaps telepathy or other magical effects could be achieved by distributing the Mass to Mind.

Obviously, this idea is still fresh for me, and I’ve never really let it go. It’s actually come to influence me a great deal, or it sprung from some deep central beam inside me. I’ve been obsessed with balance — with my swings from social to anti-, from productive to fallow, and in trying to achieve some kind of middle ground where I could be healthier on a constant basis. Something more akin to oscillation than real balance has been much more of a theme, but that central ground has always been a focus.

Maybe I’m just swinging back from one extreme, maybe I just haven’t been doing a good job of balancing — but I’m feeling now that the middle ground isn’t cutting it for me. I’m doing a lot of hedging and tip-toeing to stay balanced, and either I’m not effectively applying everything I’ve learned (entirely possible), or my balance-point is actually somewhere besides where I’ve planted the fulcrum (almost definitely true). Or maybe balance isn’t really an effective way to approach a life. Who knows?

All of that to say: I don’t want to be Steve Jobs. Definitely not Fake Steve. It’s not who I am. But am I a lot more like him than I usually allow myself to think?

This article by John Siracusa which I read a couple of months ago has been on my mind a lot. Especially where he says:

“But the real turning point for me came with the onset of puberty and its accompanying compulsive self-analysis. I realized that I owed what success I had as an artist not to any specific art-related aptitude, but rather to a more general and completely orthogonal skill.

Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that’s in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that’s in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.”

I used to copy other people’s drawings in exacting detail. Ask me to show you the Spider-Man notebook sometime. And while I’ve slowly developed the ability to draw from my own mind, for the most part I’m good at drawing something I can see and just doing it until it’s right. Often correcting “errors” in the original. A lot of what qualifies me to be “designer,” if I am, is that I hate it when things look wrong. And I’ll arrange something until it (mostly) stops looking broken.

The weird thing there is, I also hate if something has been done before. Which means that, while I notice when something looks wrong, I’m also noticing when things look right but are just following the rules. Especially if I’m just following rules I’ve set up for myself.

Which makes developing a personal aesthetic or style something of a contradiction, and while at any given time I’ve had things I liked best, I don’t know what, if anything, is part of my style. And if I notice something is becoming stylistically consistent, I have a desire to break it and find something new.

Which is exhausting.

Emily once told me that the hardest thing about being friends with me was even considering the possibility that I might be judging her anywhere near as harshly as I judged myself. I didn’t know what to make of that, exactly, and I think in the four years since she told me that, I’ve developed entirely the wrong responses to it.

Which is to say: I’ve stopped holding myself to the same standards of quality and freshness, while at the same time doling out more of that judgment to the people around me. Especially recently, I’ve become much more rule-oriented and design-standards-concerned, and have been a lot more cynical and harsh about the general shittiness of the designed world and a lot less optimistic about my ability to do anything to reinvigorate it. I’ve also been more prone to cut down other people and the things they like, which is something that stems from being, in some ways, less personally satisfied.

Which is weird, because in some ways the last two months have been some of the most productive of my life.

… Well, August and most of September were. Since the end of September I’ve been producing less, and all it takes is a week or two of stagnance to put me in a foul mood. The balance, as it were, is delicate. Maybe too delicate. Something I’ve been trying to keep in mind.

So then, long-windedly, I must consider what has led to my being less productive, if anything. There’s always the threat of laziness, or wanting to take it easy for a bit. The sense of a job well done deserving a reward. That’s important; if I work hard for a few days, I want to take a day off. And, at least for the last two+ weeks, I think that’s what’s been missing: I haven’t just taken a god damn day or two off.

“Day off” meaning one of near-complete solitude. In the comfort of my home, usually with a good video game and some podcasts and music. I enjoy travel, I enjoy meeting with friends, I enjoy good solid work — but nothing refreshes me like a day in my chair with Dragon Quarter and You Look Nice Today and absolutely no other concerns.

And I’ve been well aware of that, for weeks, but I haven’t taken it. I’ve had opportunity. But I haven’t done it. As a result, I haven’t been fully concentrating on anything else, either.

Frankly, I am aware this makes me something of a diva. Or: an entity with parameters and calibration needs of which I’m becoming aware. Also Frankly: fuck you if you don’t like it. I care about a lot of things, and a lot of people, but the thing I care about most, the thing I’ve been most interested in for as long as I can remember, is “operating at my best and producing beautiful things.” A conjuncted entity with inextricable parts. It’s the only thing that really gives me pleasure, and the only thing that, without it, I’m completely unable to enjoy anything else.

El Jobso bases almost all of his decisions on whether or not an activity puts him in a good state for creativity. And, as appalling as most of the Dictator for Life’s behavior was, every SINGLE time he talked about creating beautiful things and not having time for the other “bullshit” (such as the possibility of indictment over backdated stock options), the tuning fork in my chest resonated violently.

So the flipping sides of a current problem: I haven’t been doing enough work. I haven’t been resting enough. I’ve been in what could probably be termed a fairly balanced position, where the masses on all sides are fairly small. The trick of the Balance system I invented years ago was that, in order to add more and more Mass to the whole system, the entirety had to advance together. A person could only get so strong while neglecting their mind before they reached a limit of tolerance. But if a person’s Mind, Body and Spirit were all advancing together, the total capacity could increase without end.

And that’s the crux of what I was reaching for all those years ago, and still reach for: forward movement. Constant improvement. New frontiers of capability and activity.

The most important thing for Fake Steve is that he completely owns his egomania. And for any of us (but, honestly, just for me because I can’t proscribe anything for anyone else and usually when I do they get hurt), I think the most important thing may be to know what it is you want, and to be unashamed of proceeding toward it. To be uninhibited by yourself or others. And to foremost be honest about what that objective really is.

And then: To Live It. Wholly. Unrelentingly. As much as you’re able. As much as I’m able.

…

Further from Mr. Siracusa:

“Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it’s presented in large doses. It’s impolite. It’s unnecessarily obsessive. It’s just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what’s wrong with it to begin with.

This character flaw, this curse, this seemingly most useless of skills is actually the yin to the more widely recognized yang of creative talent. Is a preternatural ability to find fault enough on its own to make something great? Probably not, but it can help amplify mundane competencies and produce results well beyond what you could have achieved with your creative skills alone.

No, we can’t all be Steve Jobs, but there’s room in life for both the grand and the prosaic. Every day is a new chance to do something a little bit better (“I am the Steve Jobs of this sandwich!”), to find something wrong with what you’re doing and understand it well enough to know how to fix it.”

…

The book’s also reasonably funny, in a pop culture sort of way. I’d say it was informative, but I have no idea which portions were real, and which speculative. Mostly enjoyable. Three and three-quarter stars.

Posted Sunday, October 18th, at 10:22 PM (∞).

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