reality distortion field

Apple: The First 50 Years

by David Pogue  · 10 Mar 2026  · 686pp  · 216,944 words

had no trouble wooing whomever he wanted. He had, in the phrase that Bud Tribble borrowed from the “Menagerie” episode of Star Trek, a reality distortion field. The reality distortion field, in Hertzfeld’s view, was the combination of “a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the

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another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently. Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it.” It was like a return to the thrill of the old Jobs garage

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. They were, he said, “universally young, passionate, idealistic, and brilliant.” After weeks of working on Sculley, Jobs flew to New York one more time, his reality distortion field set to high. “He didn’t care that I didn’t have a technical background,” Sculley says. “He didn’t have a technical background, either

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. In subsequent years, Corning (with a $200 million research contribution from Apple) made steady improvements to Gorilla Glass, making it increasingly scratchproof. The Steve Jobs reality-distortion field has had some epic successes. But convincing one of the world’s largest glass manufacturers to convert a factory, resurrect a 1962 chemical process, and

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,” Cook says. “The people who knew me best advised me to stay at Compaq.” But his meeting with Jobs has all the hallmarks of direct reality-distortion-field exposure. “We started to talk, and I swear, five minutes into the conversation, I’m thinking: I want to do this. And it was a

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-Apple projects with Wozniak, 2, 9–10, 14, 28 product downsizing, 230, 231, 255, 257, 302–4, 322, 325 Raskin and, 85, 89, 91–92 reality distortion field, 94, 123, 135, 284, 311, 369, 409, 446, 448, 463 at Reed College, 11 reorganization under, 312 replacement of Apple’s board by, 300–301

The Scandal of Money

by George Gilder  · 23 Feb 2016  · 209pp  · 53,236 words

entropy. It can be used to prioritize all the trade-offs and accounts of entrepreneurial life. Without time constraints, anything seems possible, particularly in the reality-distortion fields of government power. Money imposes time limits on enterprise and restrictions on government power. Real money brings reality to economic life. By mutilating the rigorous

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion

by Virginia Postrel  · 5 Nov 2013  · 347pp  · 86,274 words

persuasion. It depends on maintaining exactly the right relationship between object and audience, imagination and desire. Glamour is fragile because perceptions change. Glamour creates a “reality distortion field”—Silicon Valley’s capsule description of Steve Jobs’s persuasive magic—and because of its artifice, it is always suspect. The real puzzle is not

Why Buddhism is True

by Robert Wright

thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and

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, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real them.” And it doesn’t help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs. So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of

Leonardo Da Vinci

by Walter Isaacson  · 16 Oct 2017  · 799pp  · 187,221 words

. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson  · 23 Oct 2011  · 915pp  · 232,883 words

CHAPTER NINE Going Public: A Man of Wealth and Fame CHAPTER TEN The Mac Is Born: You Say You Want a Revolution CHAPTER ELEVEN The Reality Distortion Field: Playing by His Own Set of Rules CHAPTER TWELVE The Design: Real Artists Simplify CHAPTER THIRTEEN Building the Mac: The Journey Is the Reward CHAPTER

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two years of visits, he became increasingly intimate and revealing, though at times I witnessed what his veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his “reality distortion field.” Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory cells that happens to us all; at other times he was spinning his own version of reality

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.” According to Kottke, some of Jobs’s personality traits—including a few that lasted throughout his career—were borrowed from Friedland. “Friedland taught Steve the reality distortion field,” said Kottke. “He was charismatic and a bit of a con man and could bend situations to his very strong will. He was mercurial, sure

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. So that made me do something I didn’t think I could do.” It was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion field. “If you trust him, you can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that something should happen, then he’s just going to make

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and rather passive president, and Jobs found that he now had full rein to do what he wanted with the Mac division. CHAPTER ELEVEN THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD Playing by His Own Set of Rules The original Mac team in 1984: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and Jerry

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Jobs would not accept any contrary facts. “The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek,” Tribble explained. “Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s

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.” At first Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of working with Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” he said

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. There was little that could shield you from the force, Hertzfeld discovered. “Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while

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by Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices, someone on the team had T-shirts made. “Reality Distortion Field,” they said on the front, and on the back, “It’s in the juice!” To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was

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days. You realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.” When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they were almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t

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matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or

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could get appreciated and rise above their status. But these categories were not immutable, for Jobs could rapidly reverse himself. When briefing Hertzfeld about the reality distortion field, Tribble specifically warned him about Jobs’s tendency to resemble high-voltage alternating current. “Just because he tells you that something is awful or great

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in New York whose regular task was to chronicle the wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article quoted Bud Tribble on Jobs’s “reality distortion field” and noted that he “would occasionally burst into tears at meetings.” Perhaps the best quote came from Jef Raskin. Jobs, he declared, “would have made

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audio labs to use the Macintosh name. (In fact the issue was still being negotiated, but the moment called for a bit of the old reality distortion field.) He pulled out a bottle of mineral water and symbolically christened the prototype onstage. Down the hall, Atkinson heard the loud cheer, and with a

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to Jobs. If they knew what they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire it. By 1983 those most familiar with his reality distortion field had discovered something further: They could, if necessary, just quietly disregard what he decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would appreciate their

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from Monday, with your names on it.” “Well, we’ve got to finish it,” Steve Capps said. And so they did. Once again, Jobs’s reality distortion field pushed them to do what they had thought impossible. On Friday Randy Wigginton brought in a huge bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans for the

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have to raise the price, I’m sorry I did that to you, and my team is a bunch of idiots.’” Gates saw Jobs’s reality distortion field at play when the Xerox Star was launched. At a joint team dinner one Friday night, Jobs asked Gates how many Stars had been sold

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,” Jobs told me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, “If he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.” In a legal sense, Gates was right, as courts over the years have subsequently ruled. And on a practical level, he had a strong case

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was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap. The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales forecasts. Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team to come up with higher projections. He kept threatening the European managers that he wouldn’t give them any

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had sold well enough for the first few months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.” At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling below

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was also ready to leave. He had worried that it would be hard to quit if Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality distortion field was usually too strong for him to resist. So he plotted with Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. “I’ve got it!” he

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told Hertzfeld one day. “I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the reality distortion field. I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? It’s

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I can guarantee you: there is life after Apple.” Perhaps the greatest similarity to his days at Apple was that Jobs brought with him his reality distortion field. It was on display at the company’s first retreat at Pebble Beach in late 1985. There Jobs pronounced that the first NeXT computer would

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applications for the Macintosh, which had turned out to be hugely profitable for Microsoft. But Gates was one person who was resistant to Jobs’s reality distortion field, and as a result he decided not to create software tailored for the NeXT platform. Gates went to California to get periodic demonstrations, but each

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don’t think ‘mercurial’ is so bad after all.” After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can

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seem to have a clear answer,” Amelio later said. “He seemed to have a set of one-liners.” Amelio felt he was witnessing Jobs’s reality distortion field and was proud to be immune to it. He shooed Jobs unceremoniously out of his office. By the summer of 1996 Amelio realized that he

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him. Jobs’s obstinacy lasted for nine months after his October 2003 diagnosis. Part of it was the product of the dark side of his reality distortion field. “I think Steve has such a strong desire for the world to be a certain way that he wills it to be that way,” Levinson

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make the glass now.” “Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was good-humored and confident but not used to Jobs’s reality distortion field. He tried to explain that a false sense of confidence would not overcome engineering challenges, but that was a premise that Jobs had repeatedly shown

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it came to designing the iPhone, Ive’s design desires bumped into a fundamental law of physics that could not be changed even by a reality distortion field. Metal is not a great material to put near an antenna. As Michael Faraday showed, electromagnetic waves flow around the surface of metal, not through

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. Texaco Towers: Interviews with Andrea Cunningham, Bruce Horn, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Scott, Mike Markkula. Hertzfeld, 19–20, 26–27; Wozniak, 241–242. CHAPTER 11: THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Debi Coleman, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Joanna Hoffman, Al Eisenstat, Ann Bowers, Steve Jobs. Some of these tales have

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, 566 philanthropy and, 105–6, 423–24, 543 as prankster, 12–13, 16, 26 in primal scream therapy, 50 product launches and, 165–67 reality distortion field of, see reality distortion field religion and, 14–15 resignation letters of, 215–16, 217, 557–59 Russia visit of, 209–10 selections on iPod of, 412–14 sense

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–13, 128 ouster of, 113 SJ’s clash with, 110–13 Ratatouille (film), 441 RAZR (cell phone), 465–66 Reagan, Ronald, 192–93, 231, 547 reality distortion field, 38, 52, 117–20, 140, 145, 161, 175–76, 179, 185, 186, 191, 226, 229, 235, 240, 454, 471–72 Wozniak on, 118–19 Real

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy

by John Lee  · 13 Apr 2015  · 202pp  · 72,857 words

, I wouldn't be where I am now. What's the Limit to What You Can Achieve? Steve Jobs had what his coworkers called a reality distortion field. He would ask a developer how long it would take to perfect a certain product or piece of software, and if she said 18 months

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol  · 13 Apr 2020  · 389pp  · 112,319 words

to climb on, so he draws an apple tree. Throughout the story, his imagination brings things into existence.17 Thought experiments are your very own reality-distortion field, your choose-your-own-adventure game—your purple crayon. The purple crayon was Einstein’s favorite scientific tool, one that he carried with him even

The Chairman's Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

by Joe Aston  · 27 Oct 2024  · 362pp  · 130,141 words

, reflection and response. There had been no substantive engagement by Qantas with the judgment, parts of which were deeply humiliating to the company. Inside the reality-distortion field swathing the airline’s executive floor, nobody seemed to ask, Have we handled ourselves properly here? This was not a group of professionals prepared to

The Narcissist You Know

by Joseph Burgo  · 239pp  · 73,178 words

for his uncanny ability to impose his vision upon others. With reference to an early Star Trek episode, his colleagues at Apple called it the reality distortion field. Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the Macintosh team, describes it as “a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and an eagerness to

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