The Personality Of Steve Jobs: Nikola Tesla

He was not a crank. He was not overly skeptical. He was not bound to pseudoscience. He was certainly not bound to societal expectations. However, he was—in the simplest term that can be used—odd. Historically, many of mankind 's greatest thinkers have been so. Nikola Tesla is widely believed to have suffered from severe obsessive compulsive disorder, which led to behaviors such as circling a city block many times before entering a building.1 Isaac Newton was riddled with mental insecurities to the point of a five-day long sleepless breakdown in 1693.2 Pythagoras had a sect of devout followers, and amongst the restrictions placed upon them was a ban on the consumption of beans.3 He—Steve Jobs—certainly had his own quirks. However, his quirks

It seems that, instead, Jobs was simply a picky individual with an ability to sell ideas to the market. In order to win over the market, one does not need to be amiable, as they may need to if attempting to win over an individual. Rather, they need to be shrewd and can be more callous towards individuals. Jobs certainly was not amiable—as “he parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates[ and he] cries like a

In his total ignoring of the humanity of others, Jobs directly defies the ethics of innovation and of science. For instance, he commits flagrant plagiarism of an employee 's ideas. Jobs directly claims another 's intellectual property as his own while at Apple, as Jonathan Ive recounts, “He will go through the process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That 's no good. That 's not very good. I like that one. ' And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea.”5 Were Jobs in the realm of science, he would have been discredited and ignored for his penchant to claim the designs of others as his own. Yet, Jobs continues to have success—he is in the private marketing sector, not a purely scientific office or academia—success which is rather counter intuitive due to the nature of its mechanisms. Study of scientific past usually shows a trend of progress made through collaboration, and failure to adhere to that trend can be extremely detrimental to a field. For instance, the case of the dispute between Hermann von Hemholtz and Ewald Hering discussed in Oliver Sacks ' essay, “Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science,” is shown to be highly restrictive to the evolution of the scientific