"Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man."
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Steve Jobs’s Real Genius : The New Yorker
As Gladwell gains more and more popularity I find his insights more and more shortsighted. Calling Steve a “tweaker” is a pretty elementary claim. I’d like to believe every creative person is a “tweaker.” No ideas are original. I had a professor in collage say,”Creativity is just undiscovered plagiarism.” Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
I don’t know why I’m so off put by Gladwell’s essay, it’s not like he’s putting Steve in a bad light, or undervaluing his achievements, I just feel like he’s become a vending machine for half-baked cultural observations.
