Reality distortion field is a term first used by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs' charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project. Tribble said that the term came from Star Trek, where in The Menagerie |the Menagerie episode, it was used to describe how the aliens created their own new world through mental force.
Steve Jobs
In Chapter Three of Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson states that around 1972, while Jobs was attendingReed College, Robert Friedland "taught Steve the reality distortion field." The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself, and others around him, to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. It was said to distort his co-workers' sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and to make them believe that whatever impossible task he had at hand was possible. Jobs could also use the reality distortion field to appropriate others' ideas as his own, sometimes proposing an idea back to its originator, only a week after dismissing it. The term has been used to refer to Jobs' keynote speeches by observers and devoted users of Apple computers and products, and derisively by Apple's competitors in criticisms of Apple. On Research In Motion's official BlackBerryblog, Jim Balsillie introduced a blog post by saying "For those of us who live outside of Apple's distortion field".
Other instances
The term has been extended, with a mixture of awe and scorn, to other managers and leaders in industry who try to convince their employees to become passionately committed to projects without regard to their overall difficulty or to competitive forces in the market. It is sometimes used with regard to excessively-hyped products that are not necessarily connected with any one person.
Bill Clinton's charisma has been called a reality distortion field.
