The only thing that worries me about bringing focus to stuff like this is that people will walk away with the reverse impression- that if they're unhireable it must mean that they're just like Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs could be many things. Inspired is one of them. An asshole is another. Just because people think you're an asshole doesn't automatically mean you're inspired.
Well, that's true, but Bushnell is really the focus of the article, and he says something that is spot-on:
"The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they look sloppy or lack college credentials."
I'm worried about your impression that if you don't like someone, they can't do interesting things as Jobs did.
Who is actually "unhireable"? And even if they are, does that mean they cannot accomplish anything? Are you in charge of deciding who will never amount to anything?
They could well do interesting things, as Jobs did- I'm not saying they can't. I'm more trying to say that there is no guaranteed connection between the two, in the same way that wearing black turtlenecks isn't going to make you any more enlightened either.
This reminds me of PG's essay about startups - where he says that all great ideas look like really bad ideas in the beginning. Like black swans, the next big thing, and the person to create the next big thing seem to share the trait of not being easy to predict or spot.
There's "obvious" bad ideas like trying to sell sand in the desert.
There's the bad (underwhelming) ideas, maybe that's the most common of them, it's probably the 'trying to make a weird idea sellable'. Like 'french fries are amazing but unhealthy so let's try to sell potatoes cut as fries, but baked, with no salt'
There's also quirky ideas as bad ideas, which is the way most people go and what PG probably meant. Not to mention sometimes your idea looks like the same as a failed one already but the devil is in the details.
Depends on your investment strategy. Fads are nearly impossible to predict. So you have $100,000 to invest and this guy comes up to you with pet rocks. Another guy with toilets that sing. Another guy with shoes that play music.
Who do you give the money to? Any of these guys?
Just because fads exist, doesn't mean bad ideas don't. Banking on the pet rock was a huge gamble for someone and it somehow worked out. Fad toys must have 1 out of 100,000 success rate, if that.
I'm skeptical of trying to segment ideas into categories in the first place. It's one thing to say something is a good or bad idea as a rhetorical point, but when we're talking about sets of ideas I think it borders on useless.
At the same time, I have difficulty thinking of any examples of anyone trying to do such an obviously bad idea. The closest analogy that comes to mind for me is trying to penetrate an overly saturated market. Why would anyone want to do that? But hey, you could say that fast food burgers is extremely saturated, and yet, new companies like Five Guys are coming out, surprising, and thriving. Sometimes you can't know until it either succeeds or fails.
Selling sand in the desert isn't _that_ of an obviously bad idea. I bet some people are making good money selling sand for golf bunkers or white beaches in the likes of Abu Dhabi. Even the sand for artificial islands sometimes gets imported from elsewhere because the locally available one is too scarce or lacks some essential qualities.
You got there first. Sand for artificial beaches gets imported all the time, from many far flung places. Desert sand != coral reef sand (the white sand from dead coral, generally excreted from Parrot fish).
You probably do quite nicely selling white sands to the beach resorts of the middle east.
Jobs was almost unhirable because he had a vegan diet, no showers and no shoes. He ended up working night shifts. I haven't heard how Woz coped with this.
Downvoted for projecting your opinion of Jobs onto your (probably deliberate) misinterpretation of the story. Jobs was a difficult hire because he wasn't a team player.
I'm concerned assholes won't see assholeish behaviour as a bad thing, and instead see it as proof of their genius. I am partially concerned for them, but mostly concerned for those of us that have to work with them.
Steve Jobs could be many things. Inspired is one of them. An asshole is another. Just because people think you're an asshole doesn't automatically mean you're inspired.