1. It's clearly not beneficial to "never settle" for everything. Some things you _do_ settle on, hell you settle on them _out of habit_. Other things, like your career or love life, is not so clear. But I believe the "never settle" attitude and everything that comes with it is just useful all by itself, even though you're most likely to end up with a dead end job and die alone or with someone who hates you. Even so, the linked article is a good reminder that it's not enough to "find what you love, then do it"; you have to not be the ~99% of people who either can't find such a thing (not for lack of trying), or be stuck doing it badly. Cal Newport poses "love what you're doing" as an alternative; but is that just consolation for being a slave in whatever system you're working in?
2. Steve Jobs is known for having a personality cult. Many people on this very site have expressed that they are _unusually_ deeply affected by his death, it's kind of scary. I say this as someone who is sad that he died and as someone who uses Apple products on a daily basis. But the hero worship? I think there's something more to this part. I think most people aren't really engaged with their lives and actually despise them. The second the slightest _external_ source of inspiration appears, they're engaged and ready to do their life's work. And this is what Steve Jobs is good at doing, more than anything else: inspiring people to work harder for his company by essentially exploiting basic human psychology about feeling effective and belonging to a community. So does the world really just belong to the people who can get away with the most social manipulation? Or does this system of social manipulators being at the top only work in cultures like in America? I just wish there was some better way of doing things, to be engaged in life but not in service of a _personality_, either directly or indirectly. Or is that the only real point to life that has any behavioral consequences?
3. Steve Jobs was probably the biggest idea man ever. It is possible to categorize people into two groups: those who have the idea and those who do the implementation. Steve Jobs was good at bringing implementors together to build around a certain idea. But, often, implementors feel that they don't get enough credit, either monetarily or socially, for what they do. Yet, from personal experience, I think it's better if possible to be both at the same time. Then you know both the problem and solution in intimate detail, and don't have to deal with people, either manipulating them into doing work for you or feeling resentful at being manipulated. And for the technical side, there are a lot of nice force multipliers in the form of programming languages and libraries. But if everyone wants to be this, then we all end up working alone or with as few people as possible. How does one balance the loneliness of being both the idea guy and implementor against the resentment involved in being just one of them? Or is there some different perspective I haven't considered that isn't feel-good bullshit about the members of a team being "equally" valuable?
