“Who does this look like?” I asked the father of one of the players on the soccer team I coach while holding up a photo of a young Steve Jobs. He agreed that the picture looked just like his son.
“I wish he was Steve Jobs,” he said, chuckling. I mean, what parent wouldn’t want a Steve Jobs as offspring, right? A genius kid who grows up to change the world — for our generation, it’s the “My kid will be President someday.” But should it be?
Parenting.com offers at CNN today, “How to Raise the Next Steve Jobs,” with tips like “Ask your kid open-ended questions” and “Seize teachable moments.” Great parenting tips, but there was more to the man than his amazing technological creations and amassed fortune.
If you, too, have read Walter Isaacson’s biography, then you know that if you’re raising the next Steve Jobs, you’re also raising someone who routinely verbally abuses his underlings, all but ignores his own daughter for years and characterizes people in one of two ways, “enlightened” or “bozos.”
Says the Washington Post:
Jobs operated within his own “reality distortion field,” as his colleagues dubbed it, where he was known to bend history, lie, cajole and erupt — often in the same sentence — to fulfill his technological fantasies.
That’s got to make for a stressful Thanksgiving dinner, no?
“Pass the potatoes, you bozo.”
On the other hand, people who worked for him said that he got them to do things they never imagined they could do. And he changed the world (she wrote while listening to her iPod.) But at what cost to the people who loved him and worked with and for him.
Parenting’s Christina Vercelletto said it well:
What do you most want your kid to be? Happy? Funny? Confident? Loved? We’re betting “Valedictorian” didn’t pop to mind.
Did “The next Steve Jobs” pop into yours? Are you sure you want that?
We all have faults and foibles. The question more aptly phrased is “when you add it all up, would the costs of a Steve Jobs-like personality outweigh the benefits”? My answer is yes. There are only a few people each century who have as much impact as he did. I suspect that in great measure, the flaws were necessary to the genius. I watched an interesting biography of the composer Philip Glass last night. He is obsessed with making music in the same way Jobs was obsessed with his design and inventions. That type of obsession doesn’t easily conform to societal expectations. Their courage comes from not caring whether it does or it doesn’t and doing what they’ve been called to do anyway.