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Photograph, Palo Alto, California, 1986.
Everyday Steve Jobs bounded up the stairs into the offices of NeXT ready to kick ass and push the boundaries of the laws of physics. He could be difficult, rude, impatient and even mean, but he was also very sweet, funny, a good teacher and an inspiring leader. Today he’s been reduced to this binary cliché of the genius/jerk but he was complicated, like all human beings. At his core was a driving need to know who he could trust and that often led to conflicts when he thought an engineer had not done their homework. Any decision could risk their start-up so he pushed his team, looking for those with character who were not afraid to stand up to him. If you were confident and believed in yourself and ideas, you could completely change Steve’s mind and win the argument. This is not to excuse bad behavior, but the stakes were high and to Steve nothing was personal, it was all about building this impossible, world-changing machine that would unleash human creativity. He hoped the NeXT computer would be powerful enough to allow some kid at Stanford to cure cancer in his dorm room.
