Steve Jobs is the reason Wozniak could give away tens of millions and still have $10M and multiple houses. Otherwise he would have been a good engineer and lived a nice quiet life, but nothing like the world-touring adventure he got.
Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.
Tangential, but you don't need anywhere near millions to have a 'world-touring adventure'. The nice thing about the ability to earn money online now a days is that the cost of living in the overwhelming majority of the world is a small fraction of what you pay in the US/EU.
And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
Making that jump is obviously scary, but I think many people could find much greater contentedness (not a fan of seeking "happiness", as it's something that I think should be seen as liminal, not a desired constant state) if they only realized that the world is their oyster.
Reread the link, or even the title. He gave away all of his Apple money away, because "wealth and power are not what I live for... it was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness.. " Celebrity, in general, is awful. You never realize how pleasant it is to be able to go somewhere without being fawned over until you have that latter experience yourself, and then you proceed to avoid that place like the plague unless you have some specific engagement.
He had the privilege of giving away a fortune, to causes he cares about, largely thanks to Steve Jobs.
He's never worried about money and has millions in the bank and multiple houses, thanks to Steve Jobs.
Some people love their celebrity. I've met more than a few, including Wozniak. He seems to genuinely love it, which doesn't mean it doesn't also get tiring at times.
A man of Wozniak's talents would never worry about money in his life regardless of what he chose to do. Talent + intelligence + work ethic ensures success, regardless of one's path in life, which is mostly the point of my comment. Somebody could accumulate a bunch of money at a FAANG but not necessarily enjoy their life or work in the process. Or they could utilize the same talents to go on a globe trotting life of adventure where they may earn much less, but get the opportunity to live and enjoy life much more.
Woz stated he gave away his money because he felt it was corrupting, probably seeing what it did to people like Jobs - although it's more like Jobs was like that to begin with, and the money just made it worse. Woz has also spoken repeatedly about celebrity status. Here's [1] a nice older 'interview' of sorts where he hits on the topic extensively. He didn't want it and has no interest in it.
Interestingly something I didn't know, that's pertinent to our little thread here, is that after Woz left Apple, he became a 5th-9th grade teacher, and did so for a decade!
I've never been able to find that elusive "easy to find" online work people keep speaking of.
Am I being gaslighted or am I looking in the wrong places? In the EU in my entire 15 year carreer there have been exactly 0 companies or even vacancies offering fully remote.
You're definitely looking in the wrong places. A large number of companies are basically entirely remote at this point, for instance I know chess.com is, and they have vacancies at this very moment. You can also go indie or freelance. If you can think of something you would want to buy, somebody else probably would too. You might not make much off of it, but even a little is a lot in places outside the EU/US.
There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour, which is quite lucrative in most of the world, and you'll generally have less prep and other meta-issues to deal with.
Similarly you can also sell skills. For instance there's a huge market for chess coaching. And while I haven't tried this myself, I'm fairly certain there's some market out there for teaching/tutoring people in coding. Also if you excelled in mathematics or whatever, there's another possibility. And doing this stuff at a school, or even university, is also completely viable - in most places a bachelors is acceptable for teaching at a university.
This is really what I mean with the world being your oyster. There's so much out there but most people just don't realize these possibilities even exist.
>There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour
Hypothetically if someone was burnt out and willing to operate in the gray a bit, how much can you make (approximately) doing English lessons under the table?
Eg: I go to Thailand. I enter as a tourist. Ocassionally, I meet someone in a café and have a conversation with them. They value that enough to pay me.
One of my big pre-covid regrets is I didn't travel more... I had intended to, having been laid off just before it started but everything got locked down and I had a bit of a mental health episode, feeling trapped in interactions I didn't consent to as I spent money on rent I could have spent on hotels etc.
Right as COVID fell, I'd been researching doing the Moscow to Beijing train then exploring SE Asia... it's funny how much of the planned route is possibly bust... for example, I was going to skip mainland China and only visit HK since less visa issues, not sure if that's still possible...
I was speaking more of software, but in general the thing I find is that when people try to figure out what other people want - when they themselves don't necessarily want it, they have trouble remaining objective. Some friends are serial entrepreneurs and they keep coming up with these horrible ideas that they convince themselves others people would want. Maybe one day they'll be right, but in the mean time it looks pretty silly.
OTOH I think Amazon would have sounded like a horrible idea. A book store minus the ability to peruse the books, pick up a coffee, or browse in the same sort of way? I wonder if it really was a great idea, or it's just some weird butterfly effect that drove it up, up, and away.
I remember the Amazon rollout. The pitch was order a book from anywhere and get a biggest selection of books and price. Small book stores were getting eaten up by Chapters letting you read the entire book. Amazon's secret sauce was accessable affiliate marketing. They had and probably still have the biggest affiliate program and at first the only game on town.
Food/coffee came later when the in person business was declining.
I think GP makes it sound far easier than it really is, but there’s also clearly not “exactly zero” such roles. (I have team members based in EU working remotely. Retention is high and we get a lot of applicants when we open new roles. Those are good for the employer side but negative for individual applicants.)
In my experience, it's much easier as a freelancer. Usually what is meant to be a couple weeks gig turns out to be a couple months or year-long business relationship.
I've worked in 3 places that were fully 100% remote. I'm from Barcelona, ES. They are not the modt common but they do exist if you look for them and there are quite a lot.
//And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.
What typed of jobs is this referring to, besides teaching English ?
The obvious one is definitely teaching, though not just English. For online teaching, English is a major lingua franca and any skill you might want to teach, from chess to calculus - there will be plenty of online students available in English, even if that may often not be their native tongue.
For in person teaching it's the same thing. Most countries have a system of bilingual schools, international schools, and then university type schools. And all of these offer English language instruction in everything from PE to Calculus. The major difference between a bilingual school and an international school is that the latter will generally pay much more and expect much more with certification a stated requirement, though in practice it often is not.
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Outside of that there's endless odd jobs available that are in need of English speakers. I have friends working in everything from marketing to rehab. A good idea there would be to pick a country you're interested, find the common job boards there (which LLMs may be excellent for, though I have not used them for this myself - yet) and simply search for 'English' or other such keywords. You'll be surprised.
Jobs was a fanatical asshole, and Woz knew he was making a deal with the devil.
You clearly know nothing about the history of these two. Or, maybe even more likely, you want this to be true so you can feel better about your life being relatively unimportant in comparison to Steve Jobs' life. Seems to be very common.
Woz and Jobs were best friends as teenagers and loved each other. And like many good friends they had their issues but loved and respected each other until the end.
Woz wasn't doing a deal with the devil. He was co-founding a startup with his extremely ambitious and abrasive best friend.
Almost everyone that ever worked closely with Steve Jobs came away with enormous respect for him and deeply appreciated their time together. Yes, they also say that he was sometimes an asshole but that's how people are: complicated.
There's a very good chance more than a few people think you're an asshole at times.
Steve Jobs is the reason Apple, Next, and Pixar made their mark on history. No amount of envy and revisionist history can change this.
The way you have discounted Wozniak's talent, one can also discount Steve's ambition. There are thousands of people same or more ambitious than Jobs. Being ambitious doesn't guarantee anything, neither does being as good as wozniak only work when combined with ambition.
Steve Jobs brought a hell of a lot more to the table than just raw ambition.
I just meant to contrast the level of ambition between the two. Wozniak was extremely unambitious and Jobs pushed him into starting a company, with great difficulty.
Nothing is guaranteed in life but I've certainly met more than a few people that I predicted would be successful and then they were. There are character traits that incline people toward success.
I disagree. Woz was a rare talent that would have found great success in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Would he have been as famous as he is now? Maybe not. But here he is at the end telling us that happiness was the point, not fame or billions.
He’d have found great success by his own measures if HP just let do more of the things he found interesting. Those measures wouldn’t have shown up in his bank account, but I think he’d have been happy.
On the contrary, I know all about that. Wozniak's company was self-funded with his Apple money (thanks Steve Jobs). It was innovative but not terribly so and was a complete failure as a business.
Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.