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 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 IBM. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

当Mac团队的成员们陷入他的现实扭曲力场时，他们就好像被催眠了一样。“他让我想起了拉斯普京①，”黛比·科尔曼（DebiColeman）说，“他会死死地盯着你，眼睛一眨都不眨。哪怕他端给你一杯毒药，你也会乖乖地喝下去。”但是，和沃兹尼亚克一样，她也认为现实扭曲力场是充满力量的：它让乔布斯激励自己的团队，在掌握的资源远不及施乐及IBM的情况下，改变了计算机产业的进程。“那是一种自我实现的扭曲，”她说，“你完成了不可能完成的任务，因为你并没有意识到它是不可能完成的。”

At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him. He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. “He thinks there are a few people who are special—people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India—and he’s one of them,” said Hertzfeld. “He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the überman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.” If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him.

现实扭曲力场的根源在于乔布斯内心深处不可动摇的信念：世界上的规则都不适用于他。这在他身上是有迹可循的：小时候，他就经常可以让现实屈服于自己的欲望。但他认为自己可以无视规则的信念还有更深层次的原因，就是深深植根于他性格中的叛逆与固执。他觉得自己很特别：他是被上天选中并受到启示的。“他认为有一些人是很特别的——比如他自己、爱因斯坦、甘地以及他在印度遇到的那些导师——而他就是其中之一，”赫茨菲尔德说，“他跟克里斯安讲过这些。有一次他甚至暗示我，他是受到过上天启示的。这些话就像是从尼采口中说出来的。”乔布斯从没有研究过尼采，但他的天性与尼采的一些思想不谋而合：对权力的渴望，以及“超人”（Uberman）的特殊本性。尼采在《查拉图斯特拉如是说》中写道：“精神现在拥有了自己的意志；被世界所驱逐的人，终于赢得了自己的世界！”如果现实与乔布斯的意愿不一致的话，他就会忽略现实，他的女儿丽萨出生时他就是这么做的；多年以后，当他第一次被诊断患上了癌症时，他也是这么做的。即使平时一些小小的叛逆行为，比如汽车不装牌照，或是将车停在残疾人停车位上，他也表现得好像完全不受规则和现实的约束。

Another key aspect of Jobs’s worldview was his binary way of categorizing things. People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.” Bill Atkinson, the Mac designer who fell on the good side of these dichotomies, described what it was like:

乔布斯的世界观的另一个重要方面，就是他对人或物进行分类时，非黑即白的思维方式。人要么就是“受到过启示的”，要么就是“饭桶”；人们的工作成果要么是“最棒的”，要么就是“完全的垃圾”。Mac的设计师比尔·阿特金森在这样的二分法中获得的总是积极的评价，他有如下描述：

It was difficult working under Steve, because there was a great polarity between gods and shitheads. If you were a god, you were up on a pedestal and could do no wrong. Those of us who were considered to be gods, as I was, knew that we were actually mortal and made bad engineering decisions and farted like any person, so we were always afraid that we would get knocked off our pedestal. The ones who were shitheads, who were brilliant engineers working very hard, felt there was no way they could get appreciated and rise above their status.

在史蒂夫手下工作太难了，因为“神”与“白痴”之间的两极分化太严重了。如果你是神，你就是高高在上，存在于神坛上的，绝不能犯错误。我们当中被认为是神的那些人，比如说我，都知道自己实际上也是凡人，我们也会作出糟糕的工程决定，也会像任何人一样吃饭放屁，所以我们总是害怕会被赶下神坛。而那些被认为是白痴的，他们其实也是辛勤工作的杰出工程师，但他们就会觉得·自己永远都得不到赏识，永远无法摆脱白痴的身份。

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, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow,” Tribble explained. “If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”

但这样的分类并不是永恒不变的。尤其是当乔布斯的看法是关于想法而不是关于人的时候，他有时会很快推翻自己先前的结论。特里布尔在向赫茨菲尔德介绍现实扭曲力场时，特别叮嘱他：乔布斯就像高压交流电一样善变。“他告诉你某样东西是糟糕的或者绝妙的，并不代表他明天还会这么想，”特里布尔解释说，“如果你告诉他一个新想法，他通常会告诉你他认为这个想法很愚蠢。但之后，如果他真的喜欢上了这个想法，一个星期之后，他会找到你，然后把你的想法再提出来，就好像是他自己想出来的一样。”

The audacity of this pirouette technique would have dazzled Diaghilev. “If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another,” Hertzfeld said. “Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.” That happened repeatedly to Bruce Horn, the programmer who, with Tesler, had been lured from Xerox PARC. “One week I’d tell him about an idea that I had, and he would say it was crazy,” recalled Horn. “The next week, he’d come and say, ‘Hey I have this great idea’—and it would be my idea! You’d call him on it and say, ‘Steve, I told you that a week ago,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ and just move right along.”

这种脚尖旋转技巧的大胆程度，即便是迪亚吉列夫②看了，也会眼花缭乱。布鲁斯·霍恩是和#斯勒一起从施乐PARC跳槽到苹果的程序贯，他就亲历了多次这样的事情。“某一天，我会跟他提一个自己的想法，他会说那太疯狂了，”霍恩说，“到下一周，他会跑过来跟我说：‘嘿！我有个很棒的主意’——而那正是我的主意！我跟他说：‘史蒂夫，一个星期之前我就跟你说过这个了。’他就会说：‘知道了知道了。’然后继续讲下去。”