Reading 09: All Star

Linus Torvalds is like a rock star to me. Though not in the way one might expect. To me rock stars are people to look at and say, “man it would be awesome to be able to play an instrument like that, but I don’t want to be a rock star.” Rock stars, and Linus Torvalds, have a great talent. They are some of the most talented and smartest people in the world, but I do not envy them. There is so much that comes along with being a rock star that I would not want as part of my life. I don’t want to deal with the depression most fight with. The drugs, the demons, and hatred. There is so much of it that is associated with being a rock star that I want nothing to do with. Especially because the road to being a rock star has all of these faults, and most people break down somewhere on that road and never reach real rock stardom. I feel the same about Linus Torvalds. Linus’ life, especially the early life, sounds very lonely and sad. He has and has had a hard time connecting with people and with dealing with life. He is an incredible programmer, possibly because he preferred interacting with computers than with people, and it is great that he found what makes him happy, but there is a lot in his past that I wish to avoid. I don’t want to be Linus Torvalds. But I also don’t want to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Gates and Jobs are, or were, constantly under a microscope, everything they’ve ever done has been closely examined and dissected. What strike me most about Torvalds, Gates, Jobs, and rock stars is that they seem to be born with this drive, for computing or business or music, but I don’t have this drive in any of those areas. I don’t live and breath computers, business, or music. If I could choose a public figure that I could be like it wouldn’t be any of those people. It would be Derek Jeter. Derek Jeter was and is one of the greatest baseball players to ever play they game. For that reason, he is under a lot of scrutiny, which again I am not a big fan of, but he handles it so well. Derek Jeter has an air of professionalism about him. He never cursed out a reporter or his teammate who he thought was doing poorly. He worked hard on himself and led by example. Derek Jeter is undmistakedly an incredible baseball player, but most of that came from his hard work and determination to succeed. There are stories about him spending hours upon hours in the batting cage when he was in a slump. I also feel like athletes are better role models than rock stars, because there is a clear path to success. Start with t-ball and work your way up. There will of course be bumps in the road, but if you fall off the road, you can usually land on your feet, which doesn’t seem to be true of rock stars or programmers. Torvalds also relied mostly on himself, both for his operating system and for life, this seems like a very dangerous way to live a life. I have a few programming projects I think would be a lot of fun to work on, but the main itch I have, that I want to solve, would be to make a movie, probably animated, but to create a story, scenes, and sound design for a film and have it all come together in the end. I am not trying to do this with no support though, building it from scratch, I have learned a lot of tools through my FTT major and have support to follow my hobby by my friends and family, that I feel is a big difference than Torvalds. Another difference is he was successful in his fun project while I probably won’t be.