I have several topics in stock that I can write and write about. One of them is “idols”.
Of course, this is not a list of the most respectable people in the world. I think that it is unlikely that anyone will be able to compile such a list, even with a great desire.
For example, Einstein, he is not on my list, but he certainly deserves a place among the most respected people. I once asked a friend of mine who is studying physics if Einstein was really such a genius, and she answered in the affirmative. So why isn't it on the list then? This is because here are the people who influenced me, and not those who could have influenced me if I had realized the full value of their work.
I needed to think about someone and figure out if that person was my hero. The thoughts were varied. For example, Montaigne, the creator of the essay, is off my list. Why? Then I asked myself, what does it take to call someone a hero? It turns out that you just need to imagine what this person would do in my place in a given situation. Agree, this is not admiration at all.
After I compiled the list, I saw a common thread. Everyone on the list had two characteristics: they cared excessively about their work, but were nonetheless brutally honest. By honesty I don’t mean fulfilling everything the viewer wants. They were all fundamentally provocateurs for this reason, although they hide it to varying degrees.
Jack Lambert
I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 70s. If you weren't there at the time, it's hard to imagine how the city felt about the Steelers. All the local news was bad, the steel industry was dying. But the Steelers remained the best team in college football, and in some ways that reflected the character of our city. They did not perform miracles, but simply did their job.
Other players were more famous: Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Lyn Swan. But they were on offense, and you always pay more attention to such players. It seems to me, as a 12-year-old American football expert, that the best of them all was Jack Lambert. He was completely ruthless, that's why he was so good. He didn't just want to play well, he wanted a great game. When a player from the other team had the ball in his half of the field, he took it as a personal insult.
The Pittsburgh suburbs were a pretty boring place in the 1970s. It was boring at school. All the adults were forced to work at their jobs in large companies. Everything we saw in the media was the same and was produced somewhere else. The exception was Jack Lambert. I've never seen anyone like him.
Kenneth Clarke
Kenneth Clarke is undoubtedly one of the best nonfiction writers. Most of those who write about the history of art know absolutely nothing about it, and a lot of little things prove this. But Clarke was as excellent in his work as one can imagine.
What makes it so special? Quality of the idea. At first, the style of expression may seem ordinary, but this is deception. Reading Nudity is comparable only to driving a Ferrari: once you're settled in, you're pinned into the seat by the high speed. While you get used to it, you will be thrown around when the car turns. This person produces ideas so quickly that there is no way to catch them. You will finish reading the chapter with your eyes wide open and a smile on your face.
Thanks to the documentary series Civilization, Kenneth was popular in his day. And if you want to get acquainted with the history of art, Civilization is what I recommend. This piece is much better than the ones students are forced to buy when studying art history.
Larry Michalko
Everyone in childhood had their own mentor in certain matters. Larry Michalko was my mentor. Looking back, I saw a certain line between the third and fourth grades. After I met Mr. Mikhalko, everything became different.
Why is that? First of all, he was curious. Yes, of course, many of my teachers were quite educated, but not curious. Larry didn't fit the mold of a schoolteacher, and I suspect he knew it. It may have been difficult for him, but for us students it was enjoyable. His lessons were a journey to another world. That's why I liked going to school every day.
Another thing that distinguished him from others was his love for us. Children never lie. Other teachers were indifferent to the students, but Mr. Mihalko sought to become our friend. One of the last days of 4th grade, he played us a James Taylor record of “You’ve Got a Friend.” Just call me and wherever I am, I will fly. He died when he was 59 years old from lung cancer. The only time I cried was at his funeral.
Leonardo
I recently realized something that I didn’t understand as a child: the best things we do are for ourselves, not for others. You see paintings in museums and believe that they were painted exclusively for you. Most of these works are meant to show the world, not to satisfy people. These discoveries are sometimes more pleasant than those things created to satisfy.
Leonardo was multifaceted. One of his most honorable qualities: he did so many great things. Today people only know him as a great artist and inventor of the flying machine. From this we can believe that Leonardo was a dreamer who threw all the concepts of launch vehicles aside. In fact, he made a large number of technical discoveries. So, we can say that he was not only a great artist, but also an excellent engineer.
For me, his paintings still play the main role. In them he tried to explore the world, and not show beauty. And yet, Leonardo’s paintings stand alongside those of a world-class artist. No one else, before or since, was that good when no one was looking.
Robert Morris
Robert Morris was always characterized by being right in everything. It seems like you have to be all-knowing to do this, but it's actually surprisingly easy. Don't say anything if you're not sure. If you're not all-knowing, just don't talk too much.
More precisely, the trick is to pay attention to what you want to say. Using this trick, Robert, as far as I know, only made a mistake once, when he was a student. When Mac came out, he said that small desktop computers would never be suitable for real hacking.
In this case it is not called a trick. If he had realized that this was a trick, he would definitely have misspoke in his moment of excitement. Robert has this quality in his blood. He's also incredibly honest. Not only is he always right, but he also knows that he is right.
You probably thought how nice it would be to never make mistakes, and everyone did it. It's too hard to pay as much attention to the mistakes in an idea as to the idea as a whole. But in practice no one does this. I know how hard it is. After meeting Robert I tried to use this principle in software, he seemed to use it in hardware.
P. G. Woodhouse
Finally, people realized the importance of the person of the writer Wodehouse. If you want to be accepted as a writer today, you need to be educated. If your creation has gained public recognition and it is funny, then you are opening yourself up to suspicion. That's what makes Wodehouse's work so fascinating - he wrote what he wanted and understood that for this he would be treated with contempt by his contemporaries.
Evelyn Waugh recognized him as the best, but in those days people called it an overly chivalrous and at the same time incorrect gesture. At that time, any random autobiographical novel by a recent college graduate could count on more respectful treatment from the literary establishment
Wodehouse may have started with simple atoms, but the way he combined them into molecules was almost flawless. Its rhythm in particular. This makes me shy to write about this. I can think of only two other writers who come close to him in style: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. These three used English as if it belonged to them.
But Woodhouse had nothing. He wasn't shy about it. Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford cared about what other people thought of them: he wanted to appear aristocratic; she was afraid she wasn't smart enough. But Woodhouse didn't care what anyone thought of him. He wrote exactly what he wanted.
Alexander Calder
Calder is on this list because it makes me happy. Can his work compete with Leonardo's? Most likely no. Just like nothing that dates back to the 20th century can probably compete. But everything good that is in Modernism is in Calder, and he creates with his characteristic ease.
What is good about Modernism is its novelty, its freshness. The art of the 19th century began to choke.
The paintings popular at the time were basically the artistic equivalent of mansions—big, ornate, and fake. Modernism meant starting all over again, creating things with the same serious motives as children do. The artists who took advantage of this best were those who retained a childlike confidence, like Klee and Calder.
Klee was impressive because he could work in many different styles. But of the two, I like Calder more because his work seems more joyful. Ultimately, the point of art is to attract the viewer. It is difficult to predict what exactly he will like; Often, what seems interesting at first, after a month you will already get bored. Calder's sculptures never get boring. They just sit there quietly, radiating optimism like a battery that will never run out. As far as I can tell from books and photographs, the happiness in Calder's work is a reflection of his own happiness.
Jane Austen
Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to this list. I think she is the best writer of all time. I'm interested in how things are going. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the story itself. But in her novels, I can't see the mechanism at work. Although I'm interested in how she does what she does, I can't understand it because she writes so well that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of what actually happened. When I was younger, I read a lot of novels. I can no longer read most of them because there is not enough information in them. Novels seem so meager compared to history and biography. But reading Austen is like reading nonfiction. She writes so well that you don't even notice her.
John McCarthy
John McCarthy invented Lisp, the field (or at least the term) of artificial intelligence, and was an early member of the top computer science departments at MIT and Stanford. No one will argue that he is one of the greats, but for me he is special because of Lisp.
It is now difficult for us to understand what conceptual leap occurred at that time. Paradoxically, one of the reasons his achievement is so difficult to appreciate is that it was so successful. Almost every programming language invented in the last 20 years includes ideas from Lisp, and every year the average programming language becomes more like Lisp.
In 1958 these ideas were not at all obvious. In 1958, programming was thought of in two ways. Some people thought of him as a mathematician and proved everything about the Turing machine. Others saw programming language as a way to do things and developed languages that were too heavily influenced by the technology of the time. Only McCarthy overcame the differences of opinion. He developed a language which was mathematics. But I developed a word that wasn’t quite right, or rather, I discovered it.
Spitfire
As I wrote this list, I found myself thinking about people like Douglas Bader and Reginald Joseph Mitchell and Geoffrey Quill, and I realized that although they all did many things in their lives, there was one factor among others that tied them: Spitfire.
This should be a list of heroes. How can there be a car in it? Because this car was not just a car. She was the prism of heroes. Extraordinary devotion came into her, and extraordinary courage came out of her.
It is customary to call the Second World War a struggle between good and evil, but between the formation of battles, it was so. The original nemesis of the Spitfire, the ME 109, is a tough, practical aircraft. It was a killer machine. Spitfire was the embodiment of optimism. And not only in these beautiful lines: it was the pinnacle of what could, in principle, be manufactured. But we were right when we decided that we were beyond that. Only in the air does beauty have an edge.
Steve Jobs
People who were alive when Kennedy was assassinated usually remember exactly where they were when they heard about it. I remember exactly where I was when a friend asked me if I had heard that Steve Jobs had cancer. It was as if the ground had disappeared from under my feet. After a couple of seconds, she told me that it was a rare, operable form of cancer and that he would be fine. But those seconds seemed to last forever.
I wasn't sure whether to include Jobs on the list. Most people at Apple seem to be afraid of him, which is a bad sign. But he is admirable. There is no word that can describe who Steve Jobs is. He didn't create Apple products himself. Historically, the closest analogy to what he did was patronage of art during the great Renaissance. As the CEO of the company, this makes him unique. Most managers convey their preferences to their subordinates. The paradox of design is that, to a greater or lesser extent, the choice is determined by chance. But Steve Jobs had taste—so good taste that he showed the world that taste meant a lot more than they thought.
Isaac Newton
Newton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he's the one I blame myself for. He's been working on big things for at least part of his life. It's so easy to get distracted when you're working on the little things. The questions you answer are familiar to everyone. You get instant rewards—essentially, you get more rewards in your time if you work on issues of primary importance. But I hate to know that this is the path to well-deserved obscurity. To do truly great things, you need to look for questions that people didn't even think were questions. There were probably other people doing this at the time, like Newton, but Newton is my model for this way of thinking. I'm just starting to understand how it must have felt for him. You only have one life. Why not do something big? The phrase “paradigm shift” is now a tired one, but Kuhn was on to something. And behind this lies more, a wall of laziness and stupidity now separated from us, which will soon seem very thin to us. If we work like Newton.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this article.
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