Steve Jobs Playboy Interview from 1985
It’s a great read when you know what the future holds, both for the industry, for Apple, and for Jobs himself. His foreshadowing of the Internet is particularly prescient, and passages like this make me think of his commencement address at Stanford:
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
As you can see, I’ve been on a bit of a Michael Lewis kick. Ironically, I’ve had this book the longest having picked it up at a discount bookstore in an outlet mall years ago. I was so proud of the deal I got ($4.50 for a $13.00 trade paperback) that I left the price sticker on the cover (typically a sin for the bibliophile). Groping around for something to distract myself from the misery of a cold which ruined our vacation plans a couple days ago, I finally took it off the shelf.