"You can be decent and gifted at the same time" ???





I've held this belief, that you could be gifted and decent (and also implied successful)... but I'm starting to think you really can't.

Is being decent tantamount to submerging your gifts?

Actually, it depends on what you think of as gifted.

I'd speculate that Steve Wozniak had a higher IQ than Steve Jobs, but that Steve Jobs may had other personality traits that made him difficult.

I think to be a good businessperson / marketer, one's IQ needs to be in the range of one's customers and employees, say +- 30 IQ points. Beyond that, you're out of touch. The average customer might be in the 100 range and engineers 120 - 160 range. So Jobs would probably be around 130 / 140.

It seems like a lot of what seems exceptional about Jobs, for example his perfectionism, are common traits among the gifted. The thing is, Hollywood and media in general is made for 100 IQ range, so it may portray gifted behavior as abnormal (which it is). 

But to be successful in business. To be popular and famous. I think it's impossible to be that and decent at the same time. At least, decent as in a normal person. Not to say, you couldn't be moral or ethical, but decency implies a certain humbleness and desire to please and subordinate oneself that may be antithetical to those striving to be at the pinnacle of their industry. Success necessarily involves determination and competitiveness.

In this particular scene, I'd have to side with Steve Jobs in that acknowledging the Apple II team was superfluous to what the presentation was about. If you think about the presentation itself as an Apple product, such a extraneous statement goes against the elegant design style of Apple. I guess this is another embodiment of the difference in Wozniak and Jobs analogous to their arguments over the number of ports.

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