{"id":9033,"date":"2020-07-26T11:27:38","date_gmt":"2020-07-26T15:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9033"},"modified":"2020-07-26T11:27:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-26T15:27:38","slug":"strong-opinions-loosely-held","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9033","title":{"rendered":"Strong Opinions Loosely Held"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day in this Daring Fireball post about the demise of the Apple G4 Cube<\/a>, Gruber describes Steve Jobs as having \u201cstrong opinions loosely held.\u201d He says it was one of Job\u2019s truly extraordinary powers. It\u2019s hard to argue with that.<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t about Jobs hagiography. Rather, it\u2019s about the idea of having strong opinions loosely held. It is, it seems to me, a goal towards which we should all strive. On the one hand, you don\u2019t want to be a namby pamby cipher with no convictions at all. On the other hand you don\u2019t want to be one of those annoying people who won\u2019t change their mind no matter the evidence.<\/p>\n

The idea is to be strong in your opinions and to believe in them up until the moment you receive better information. That\u2019s what Jobs did with the G4. He absolutely believed in it. sung its praises, and believed that Apple would sell millions of them. Then it became clear that the G4 wasn\u2019t getting any traction and Jobs was able to pivot, admit he was wrong\u2014at least about how popular it would be\u2014and abandon the product.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about the rest of you but I could use some of that myself. It can be really hard to abandon an opinion to which you\u2019ve become attached but it\u2019s worth cultivating the ability to do so. Too bad it\u2019s not New Years; I could use it as my resolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day in this Daring Fireball post about the demise of the Apple G4 Cube, Gruber describes Steve Jobs as having \u201cstrong opinions loosely held.\u201d He says it was one of Job\u2019s truly extraordinary powers. It\u2019s hard to argue … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9034,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9033\/revisions\/9034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}