April 2008  
  
There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about.
This is one of them: a list of my heroes.  
  
I'm not claiming this is a list of the _n_ most admirable people. Who could
make such a list, even if they wanted to?  
  
Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably deserves to
be on any shortlist of admirable people. I once asked a physicist friend if
Einstein was really as smart as his fame implies, and she said that yes, he
was. So why isn't he on the list? Because I had to ask. This is a list of
people who've influenced me, not people who would have if I understood their
work.  
  
My test was to think of someone and ask "is this person my hero?" It often
returned surprising answers. For example, it returned false for Montaigne, who
was arguably the inventor of the essay. Why? When I thought about what it
meant to call someone a hero, it meant I'd decide what to do by asking what
they'd do in the same situation. That's a stricter standard than admiration.  
  
After I made the list, I looked to see if there was a pattern, and there was,
a very clear one. Everyone on the list had two qualities: they cared almost
excessively about their work, and they were absolutely honest. By honest I
don't mean trustworthy so much as that they never pander: they never say or do
something because that's what the audience wants. They are all fundamentally
subversive for this reason, though they conceal it to varying degrees.  
  
**Jack Lambert**  
  
I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Unless you were there it's hard to
imagine how that town felt about the Steelers. Locally, all the news was bad.
The steel industry was dying. But the Steelers were the best team in football
— and moreover, in a way that seemed to reflect the personality of the city.
They didn't do anything fancy. They just got the job done.  
  
Other players were more famous: Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Lynn Swann. But
they played offense, and you always get more attention for that. It seemed to
me as a twelve year old football expert that the best of them all was [Jack
Lambert](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Lambert_\(American_football_player\)).
And what made him so good was that he was utterly relentless. He didn't just
care about playing well; he cared almost too much. He seemed to regard it as a
personal insult when someone from the other team had possession of the ball on
his side of the line of scrimmage.  
  
The suburbs of Pittsburgh in the 1970s were a pretty dull place. School was
boring. All the adults around were bored with their jobs working for big
companies. Everything that came to us through the mass media was (a) blandly
uniform and (b) produced elsewhere. Jack Lambert was the exception. He was
like nothing else I'd seen.  
  
**Kenneth Clark**  
  
Kenneth Clark is the best nonfiction writer I know of, on any subject. Most
people who write about art history don't really like art; you can tell from a
thousand little signs. But Clark did, and not just intellectually, but the way
one anticipates a delicious dinner.  
  
What really makes him stand out, though, is the quality of his ideas. His
style is deceptively casual, but there is more in his books than in a library
of art monographs. Reading [_The Nude_](http://www.amazon.com/Nude-Study-
Ideal-Form/dp/0691017883) is like a ride in a Ferrari. Just as you're getting
settled, you're slammed back in your seat by the acceleration. Before you can
adjust, you're thrown sideways as the car screeches into the first turn. His
brain throws off ideas almost too fast to grasp them. Finally at the end of
the chapter you come to a halt, with your eyes wide and a big smile on your
face.  
  
Kenneth Clark was a star in his day, thanks to the documentary series
[_Civilisation_](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000F0UUKA). And if you read only
one book about art history,
[_Civilisation_](http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=clark&sts=t&tn=civilisation)
is the one I'd recommend. It's much better than the drab Sears Catalogs of art
that undergraduates are forced to buy for Art History 101.  
  
**Larry Mihalko**  
  
A lot of people have a great teacher at some point in their childhood. Larry
Mihalko was mine. When I look back it's like there's a line drawn between
third and fourth grade. After Mr. Mihalko, everything was different.  
  
Why? First of all, he was intellectually curious. I had a few other teachers
who were smart, but I wouldn't describe them as intellectually curious. In
retrospect, he was out of place as an elementary school teacher, and I think
he knew it. That must have been hard for him, but it was wonderful for us, his
students. His class was a constant adventure. I used to like going to school
every day.  
  
The other thing that made him different was that he liked us. Kids are good at
telling that. The other teachers were at best benevolently indifferent. But
Mr. Mihalko seemed like he actually wanted to be our friend. On the last day
of fourth grade, he got out one of the heavy school record players and played
James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend" to us. Just call out my name, and you
know wherever I am, I'll come running. He died at 59 of lung cancer. I've
never cried like I cried at his funeral.  
  
**Leonardo**  
  
One of the things I've learned about making things that I didn't realize when
I was a kid is that much of the best stuff isn't made for audiences, but for
oneself. You see paintings and drawings in museums and imagine they were made
for you to look at. Actually a lot of the best ones were made as a way of
exploring the world, not as a way to please other people. The best of these
explorations are sometimes more pleasing than stuff made explicitly to please.  
  
Leonardo did a lot of things. One of his most admirable qualities was that he
did so many different things that were admirable. What people know of him now
is his paintings and his more flamboyant inventions, like flying machines.
That makes him seem like some kind of dreamer who sketched artists'
conceptions of rocket ships on the side. In fact he made a large number of far
more practical technical discoveries. He was as good an engineer as a painter.  
  
His most impressive work, to me, is his
[drawings](https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/leonardo-
skull.jpg?t=1688221954&). They're clearly made more as a way of studying the
world than producing something beautiful. And yet they can hold their own with
any work of art ever made. No one else, before or since, was that good when no
one was looking.  
  
**Robert Morris**  
  
Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this
would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't
say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you
just don't end up saying much.  
  
More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how you qualify what
you say. By using this trick, Robert has, as far as I know, managed to be
mistaken only once, and that was when he was an undergrad. When the Mac came
out, he said that little desktop computers would never be suitable for real
hacking.  
  
It's wrong to call it a trick in his case, though. If it were a conscious
trick, he would have slipped in a moment of excitement. With Robert this
quality is wired-in. He has an almost superhuman integrity. He's not just
generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.  
  
You'd think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong that everyone
would do this. It doesn't seem like that much extra work to pay as much
attention to the error on an idea as to the idea itself. And yet practically
no one does. I know how hard it is, because since meeting Robert I've tried to
do in software what he seems to do in hardware.  
  
**P. G. Wodehouse**  
  
People are finally starting to admit that Wodehouse was a great writer. If you
want to be thought a great novelist in your own time, you have to sound
intellectual. If what you write is popular, or entertaining, or funny, you're
ipso facto suspect. That makes Wodehouse doubly impressive, because it meant
that to write as he wanted to, he had to commit to being despised in his own
lifetime.  
  
Evelyn Waugh called him a great writer, but to most people at the time that
would have read as a chivalrous or deliberately perverse gesture. At the time
any random autobiographical novel by a recent college grad could count on more
respectful treatment from the literary establishment.  
  
Wodehouse may have begun with simple atoms, but the way he composed them into
molecules was near faultless. His rhythm in particular. It makes me self-
conscious to write about it. I can think of only two other writers who came
near him for style: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Those three used the
English language like they owned it.  
  
But Wodehouse has something neither of them did. He's at ease. Evelyn Waugh
and Nancy Mitford cared what other people thought of them: he wanted to seem
aristocratic; she was afraid she wasn't smart enough. But Wodehouse didn't
give a damn what anyone thought of him. He wrote exactly what he wanted.  
  
**Alexander Calder**  
  
Calder's on this list because he makes me happy. Can his work stand up to
Leonardo's? Probably not. There might not be anything from the 20th Century
that can. But what was good about Modernism, Calder had, and had in a way that
he made seem effortless.  
  
What was good about Modernism was its freshness. Art became stuffy in the
nineteenth century. The paintings that were popular at the time were mostly
the art equivalent of McMansions—big, pretentious, and fake. Modernism meant
starting over, making things with the same earnest motives that children
might. The artists who benefited most from this were the ones who had
preserved a child's confidence, like Klee and Calder.  
  
Klee was impressive because he could work in so many different styles. But
between the two I like Calder better, because his work seemed happier.
Ultimately the point of art is to engage the viewer. It's hard to predict what
will; often something that seems interesting at first will bore you after a
month. Calder's
[sculptures](https://www.flickr.com/photos/uergevich/7029234689/) never get
boring. They just sit there quietly radiating optimism, like a battery that
never runs out. As far as I can tell from books and photographs, the happiness
of Calder's work is his own happiness showing through.  
  
**Jane Austen**  
  
Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the
best novelist of all time.  
  
I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much
attention to the author's choices as to the story. But in her novels I can't
see the gears at work. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she
does, I can't figure it out, because she's so good that her stories don't seem
made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of something that actually
happened.  
  
I used to read a lot of novels when I was younger. I can't read most anymore,
because they don't have enough information in them. Novels seem so
impoverished compared to history and biography. But reading Austen is like
reading nonfiction. She writes so well you don't even notice her.  
  
**John McCarthy**  
  
John McCarthy invented Lisp, the field of (or at least the term) artificial
intelligence, and was an early member of both of the top two computer science
departments, MIT and Stanford. No one would dispute that he's one of the
greats, but he's an especial hero to me because of [Lisp](rootsoflisp.html).  
  
It's hard for us now to understand what a conceptual leap that was at the
time. Paradoxically, one of the reasons his achievement is hard to appreciate
is that it was so successful. Practically every programming language invented
in the last 20 years includes ideas from Lisp, and each year the median
language gets more Lisplike.  
  
In 1958 these ideas were anything but obvious. In 1958 there seem to have been
two ways of thinking about programming. Some people thought of it as math, and
proved things about Turing Machines. Others thought of it as a way to get
things done, and designed languages all too influenced by the technology of
the day. McCarthy alone bridged the gap. He designed a language that was math.
But designed is not really the word; discovered is more like it.  
  
**The Spitfire**  
  
As I was making this list I found myself thinking of people like [Douglas
Bader](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Bader) and [R.J.
Mitchell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._J._Mitchell) and [Jeffrey
Quill](http://www.amazon.com/Spitfire-Pilots-Story-Crecy-Cover/dp/0947554726)
and I realized that though all of them had done many things in their lives,
there was one factor above all that connected them: the Spitfire.  
  
This is supposed to be a list of heroes. How can a machine be on it? Because
that machine was not just a machine. It was a lens of heroes. Extraordinary
devotion went into it, and extraordinary courage came out.  
  
It's a cliche to call World War II a contest between good and evil, but
between fighter designs, it really was. The Spitfire's original nemesis, the
ME 109, was a brutally practical plane. It was a killing machine. The Spitfire
was optimism embodied. And not just in its beautiful lines: it was at the edge
of what could be manufactured. But taking the high road worked. In the air,
beauty had the edge, just.  
  
**Steve Jobs**  
  
People alive when Kennedy was killed usually remember exactly where they were
when they heard about it. I remember exactly where I was when a friend asked
if I'd heard Steve Jobs had cancer. It was like the floor dropped out. A few
seconds later she told me that it was a rare operable type, and that he'd be
ok. But those seconds seemed long.  
  
I wasn't sure whether to include Jobs on this list. A lot of people at Apple
seem to be afraid of him, which is a bad sign. But he compels admiration.  
  
There's no name for what Steve Jobs is, because there hasn't been anyone quite
like him before. He doesn't design Apple's products himself. Historically the
closest analogy to what he does are the great Renaissance patrons of the arts.
As the CEO of a company, that makes him unique.  
  
Most CEOs delegate [taste](taste.html) to a subordinate. The [design
paradox](gh.html) means they're choosing more or less at random. But Steve
Jobs actually has taste himself — such good taste that he's shown the world
how much more important taste is than they realized.  
  
**Isaac Newton**  
  
Newton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he's the one I reproach
myself with. He worked on big things, at least for part of his life. It's so
easy to get distracted working on small stuff. The questions you're answering
are pleasantly familiar. You get immediate rewards — in fact, you get bigger
rewards in your time if you work on matters of passing importance. But I'm
uncomfortably aware that this is the route to well-deserved obscurity.  
  
To do really great things, you have to seek out questions people didn't even
realize were questions. There have probably been other people who did this as
well as Newton, for their time, but Newton is my model of this kind of
thought. I can just begin to understand what it must have felt like for him.  
  
You only get one life. Why not do something huge? The phrase "paradigm shift"
is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something. And you know more are out there,
separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness
and stupidity. If we work like Newton.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for
reading drafts of this.  
  

