So different

This is a rarely seen photo from the early nineties in which we see the young Steve Jobs and Bill Gates posing for a magazine. No words are needed to recognize the obvious differences in personality between them, differences that would ultimately be reflected in their products.

This brings to mind something Steve Jobs said about creativity:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.\ – Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1995

What I like most are the last three sentences:

"A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

While some people met in offices with whiteboards and notebooks to solve a problem, Steve Jobs devoted himself to fully living the human experience: he traveled, learned, faced conflicts, made mistakes, changed religions, experimented with drugs, got his girlfriend pregnant, was self-centered, was kind, helped people, regretted his mistakes, made a fool of himself, became a legend, and gained the experience that comes from an intense life, not from market research.