Yes I agree

As anyone who has seen "Pirates of Silicon Valley" can attest, neither Jobs nor Gates were pure inventors. Many of the ideas both Jobs and Gates incorporated into their products were developed by Xerox-PARC, including the graphical user interface and the mouse. Gates founded Microsoft by buying a rival operating system for license to IBM, but he did write the BASIC language so he wasn't a complete idiot. Jobs had Wozniak as a partner (who was freaking brilliant) who did much of the hardware side of things and Jobs acted as the businessman, but Jobs too had a firm foundation.

I think the thing that Jobs did very well was to see how to apply an invention in a novel way. That in and of itself is a special kind of genius. Gates [evil] genius was in recognizing and pioneering software licensing - a novel practice when ownership was the norm.

Jobs was an eccentric genius. As such, he could be as bewildering as he was on target. Fortunately for us, the genius part was better than the eccentric part.

Actually both Gates and Jobs took advantage of the phrase "good designers copy; great designers steal"

I dont think I could have made an atomic bomb or a nuclear power plant (at least in any reasonable amount of time)

The movie "The Edge" with Anthony Hopkins is a story about being hunted by a bear and one of the big lines is "what one man can do, another can do.." . Their only choice was to kill this huge bear with only spears they made.

Even Stalin was a proponent of that- once he saw us make an atomic bomb, he knew it was possible and he then tried it with obvious success.

its the same thing really. Genetics plus experiences plus education tends to make us better at some things than others. I love the x-men movies and I think that all of us have one or more "x-men superpowers" or "comparative advantages" , and we need to learn what they are and how to use them effectively in our lives.

I'd say "comparative advantage" rather than "x-men powers", but it amounts to the same thing. Opportunities are out there.

I have a lot of respect for Jobs. He had vision and wanted perfection. He motivated workers to put out their best, and if they didnt want that, he got rid of them.

Regarding effort and persistence, Jobs and his employees had that in spades. Does anyone remember the "90 Hours Per Week" T-shirts?

I think that is consistent with what I find also. If I get to a dead end, I go backwards and essentially check the premises on parts that that are used with it,

Kind of what one would do if you get into a dead end street. Go back and see if you can make a different previous turn that gets you where you want to go without getting stuck on the dead end street.

My father never registered terribly high on the IQ scale (about 110), but he was incredibly inventive. As a machinist, he solved a problem with the missile checkout equipment for the Polaris submarine launched missile overnight, after a team of engineers had been working on the problem for months. He retired as the Chief Field Engineer for Lockheed. His secret was that he always looked at a problem as part of a system, not in isolation, and he said that once he did that, the solution always jumped out at him. I learned that technique, and was surprised how many times I arrived at a solution long before the number crunchers.

I used to make song poems on tape. . dance tapes,
stress-relief tapes, fun tapes. . cottage industry, and
hundreds of tapes left the cottage, to go coast-to-
coast. . made lots of people happy. -- j

p.s. just recently, I got a Roland machine which
lets me put them on CD. . now, we're cookin'!
.

I dont think he is right about all people being at the same level of smartness. There is a distinct variation in intelligence among the population.

However, intelligence doesnt control performance by itself. Effort and personality traits like persistence are far more effective in obtaining success at pretty much anything.

That said, I think I could do pretty much anything, but a lot of things would take me a LONG time to master, and some things I could do very quickly and effortlessly. Growing up is finding out what your particular x-men powers are and using them.

We only wish he had learned it. Gates made his millions acquiring the ideas of others.

Thanks. Sounds like my Father's lesson, "Anything you can do you can do better next time."

I have tackled - and beaten - many things throughout my life by remembering something very simple:

If somebody else could do it, there's no reason you cannot do it, and do it better.

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you" ... hardly!

Isn't this the lesson learned by Bill Gates?

Yep...he had some strange ideas but his business ideas were inventive...

+1 He had his issues as an individual, but Apple with him at the helm created some great products. Some new, some new visions of older items.