Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
As I was about to graduate from Stanford business school in the spring of 1990, Steve Jobs invited me to visit him at NeXT, the company he had founded after being forced out of Apple a few years before.
Showing me into his office, Steve, dressed in a black turtleneck and faded jeans, plopped into his desk chair, then motioned to a pile of chopsticks on his desk. He picked up a set, opening and closing the chopsticks as he spoke. “Aren’t these just beautiful? Look how clean and simple the lines are.”
He had just been in Japan, Steve explained, and at dinner one night he found himself using the best chopsticks he had ever tried. “They’re nothing but inexpensive wood, just like any other chopsticks,” he said. “But just look at them. Beautiful. I had them ship me a bunch. Here, have one.” He tossed me a set.
As we talked in his office, then drove down 101 to Palo Alto, where we had dinner together, Steve mentioned that he’d like me to consider becoming his chief of staff—I was only two years out of the Reagan White House, and Steve figured that someone who had worked for Reagan might meet his own standards—then told me about himself. Not about his life since he had become famous. About his early life. About what it had been like to grow up as an adopted kid. About what it had been like to be raised by a repo man. “If somebody got behind in his car payments,” Steve, driving a sleek black Porsche, told me, “the bank would hire my father to get the car back. My father would tail the guy. When he pulled into a McDonalds, my father would pull in behind him. And when he got out to go in and get his hamburger, my father would jump into the car and steal it. What a way to make a living.” The sheer raw mercilessness of the market. Steve experienced it early. Yet he also spoke that evening about sheer beauty, describing the Santa Clara Valley before it became Silicon Valley. “Orchards—when I was a boy there were still orchards all around here. You should have seen it when they were flowering in the spring. Clouds of blossoms.”
I declined Steve’s offer—he made it clear that he wanted me to protect him from the demands of the NeXT executives, but his executives, with whom I spent a day, made it clear that they wanted me to get Steve to give them more of his time—but we remained in touch. Steve married a friend of mine from business school. Both of us sent our kids to the same nursery school. From time to time we would run into each other at parties or in Palo Alto. The last time I saw him, we were both at a Fourth of July block party in his neighborhood a few years ago. As neighborhood kids competed in the balloon toss and pie eating contests, Steve and I talked.
We discussed both politics (Steve defended Al Gore, who had joined the Apple board, predicting that Gore would win a Nobel Prize, which he did just months later) and business (Steve gave me his analysis of Disney, explaining why he considered Michael Eisner inadequate, detailing the inferiority of Disney’s animated motion pictures to Pixar’s, and lauding Disney’s theme parks, which he considered underrated as both artistic and commercial achievements. “The way to turn around Mexico?” Steve said. “Let Disney run the country.”) When I mentioned that I had begun reading up on the Cold War, he described his friendship with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, who had helped to develop photographic techniques for U. S. intelligence.
“Hey, Steve!” a neighborhood kid said, interrupting. “My iPhone isn’t working.”
I expected Steve to brush the young man off. Instead he took the iPhone, then spent five minutes examining the device while talking to the kid about the problems he had been having with it. Steve finally figured out what was wrong. “You’re not going to like hearing this,” he said, “but it’s not an Apple problem. It’s a problem with AT&T.” Before returning the iPhone, Steve held it up to me, pointing out the metal bezel into which the glass cover or window was set. Then he described the technical challenge involved in manufacturing it.
Intensity, ambition, a profound understanding of markets, a broad and fascinating mind—even if (and I say nothing here I failed to tell him to his face) his politics never made any sense—and a determinaton to get it right so obsessive that he felt compelled to fix a teenager’s iPhone at a block party. You can almost see how Steve earned his place. You can almost grasp how he became as important as Edison or Carnegie or Stanford or Rockefeller or Ford.
Yet one characteristic distinguished Steve Jobs from the others. It’s the characteristic that led him to toss me the chopsticks that I've kept on my desk ever since.
Only Steve insisted on beauty.
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Mar '11
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
As an Apple software engineer for the past 9 years, I saw Steve now and again, but never had occasion to meet him or present work to him. I sometimes joked that I liked it better that way, for his reputation indeed preceded him, but in truth it would have been a priceless opportunity, to glimpse Steve At Work while being held to the very standards I aspire to. Though I never quite felt at home in Apple's left-leaning culture, I'm profoundly grateful for the remarkable opportunity I've enjoyed, to innovate in the company of design and engineering giants. Steve's accomplishments included mainstreaming NeXT's exceptional but niche software technologies as the primary way to develop software for the tens of millions of Macs, iPhones, and iPads now in use. That technology has quietly revolutionized the economics of software development, making greater achievements possible in fewer man-hours with greater delight. I've had the privilege of helping to further its advance, and will get to leverage it when I strike off to pursue my own big dream as an independent Mac developer later this month -- an enterprise that Apple's success has made possible.
Apr '11
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
I've e-mailed the link to these reminiscences paired with the link to Rob Long's reflections on what a difficult SOB he was.
I have long suspected that it is a sign of our fallen condition that people who are creative and productive beyond the hum-drum, give-us-this-day-our-daily-bread level often seem to have to abandon so many virtues. Not just in the marketplace: what the liberals like to sneer at in economics they revere among the artistic. Think of the whole Romantic artist schtick, going back to Benvenuto Cellini. Even saints have been known to be difficult. It is ironic, since, as Dorothy Sayers pointed out, being Makers is part of being in the image and likeness of God.
It isn't absolutely inevitable, but it is as if striving too high, like Icarus, pushing the Divine-like part of our being too hard, is more than our human nature can bear without crumpling and springing a few rivets.
May '10
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
Peter, that is probably the best remembrance piece on Jobs that any of us will read, bar none.
Having grown up in the 80s, I am a child of the micro-chip revolution. And in those 30+ years, I have never once owned a "PC". I have been an Apple guy since the day in 7th grade when my school bought a Lisa. Then on to Apple IIe's in HS, and a IIc at home. My first Mac (which is still in storage somewhere) was a 512ke in 1986.
I have always loved Macs, and rejoice in the fact that Steve Jobs returned to save a moribund Apple Computer and inject it with the beauty you describe. We are all better for it.
Oct '11
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
I think it's great that Americans (even my liberal friends) have been so happy to celebrate Steve Jobs... A man who as far as I can tell created a company with an idea and a single minded pursuit of turning a profit and turned it into the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
The country needs people like that, and I just wish we had a government that encouraged that. Fortunately the response to Steve Jobs makes me think there's a lot of people in the country who wish for that as well.
Apr '11
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
Thanks for sharing this awesome memory Peter. And I have to say, I already thought Peter Robinson was a cool dude, but this has just blown the top off.
May '10
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
Peter, I have the feeling anyone who encounters you comes away with the notion they've just had an interaction with greatness. And I'm not saying that to be a suck up. Not... this time. You just have a wonderful way about you that homes right in on who people really are. It's what makes you such a great interviewer. You have a marvelous way of cracking people open and exposing the gems inside of them. Thank you for exposing Job's gems. He was a flawed, complicated human being. But he was a human being full of brilliance.
Aug '10
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
I spent four hours the other night trying to replace a broken glass touch screen on my 14 yr old's iphone, against her better judgement. As I put on two pairs of glasses in an attempt to see the incredibly small screws, we struggled through it to no avail.
Worriedly, I trudged to the Apple store, expecting a turndown on the warranty violation.
Two things happened there. The first was a serviceperson,with a wink, ( I'm sure they have some catchy title) who gave me a new phone and whispered that "we didn't hear that" . I gather I'm not the first , but it was endearing.
Second was the realization that us mere mortals shouldn't tamper with such beautiful instruments.
So I thank Mr Jobs for his generosity and his art. RIP
And special thanks for the affectionate wordsmithing you crafted in your post.
Mar '11
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
I walked over to Steve's house this morning with a visitor from Houston. The street was blocked at both ends to prevent a parade of cars on a very residential street. Spoke to a security guy near the house who told us they'd had a crew there for 3 months. Reporters were trying to stick cameras in the windows of Job's very modest home.
As we approached the driveway a young man stepped out who I took to be Steve's teen age son. I just said "hi" because I wasn't sure. He crossed the street to ask a reporter not to take his picture. He walked to the corner, looked, turned and went back toward the home's entrance.
At the corner were flowers brought by many neighbors and lots of green apples, some with a bite out to represent the original Apple, Inc. logo.
There was nothing to do but for us to turn around and walk back to our house.
May '10
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
Doing anything well is a wonderful thing, doing something well, and incorporating beauty into the product is an art-form. Doing it well and beautifully, in such a way that virtually everyone can grasp both of those realities..well that is akin to being magical. Steve Jobs was a magician of capitalism, as you are with words.
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
Gee, Felicia, that's just about the nicest thing anybody's ever said about me. I wish I could accept the compliments. But when my wife sees this....
May '10
Re: Steve Jobs's Chopsticks
Peter Robinson
Gee, Felicia, that's just about the nicest thing anybody's ever said about me. I wish I could accept the compliments. But when my wife sees this.... · Oct 6 at 11:44pm
She'd deflate your ego just a bit so you could make it through the door and then would smile proudly a little bit behind your back. It's what we chicks do.