Steve Jobs

Writer Walter Isaacson

Created @October 24, 2021 1:31 PM

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The People who are crazy enough to think they can change the
world are the ones who do.
→Steve Jobs

Introduction

Steve Jobs 1
 This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a
creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive
revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music,
phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Childhood
He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of
himself.

Odd Couple
“I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance
you could reach in the world.” Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It takes society to a
new level.”

The Dropout
Intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract
thinking and intellectual logical analysis.

Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his
parents’ money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. “All of my
working-class parents’ were being spent on my college tuition,” he recounted in
a famous commencement address at Stanford. “I had no idea what I wanted to
do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And
here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I
decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.”

Atari and India

Coming back to America was, for me much more of a cultural shock than going
to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,
they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in
the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than
intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.

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 If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is.
If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does
calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things
—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see
things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just
slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment.
You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a
discipline; you have to practice it.

“There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur and I saw that in Steve,” he

said. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I
taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him,
‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”

The Apple I

The Apple II
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should
be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.

Chrisann And Lisa

At times he was able to distort reality not just for others but even for himself.

Xerox and Lisa

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

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 The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest
heists in the chronicles of industries.

Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’

It’s not as if Xerox executives ignored what their scientists had created at PARC.
In fact they did try to capitalize on it, and in the process they showed why good
execution is as important as good ideas.

Steve wasn’t much of an engineer himself, but he was very good at assessing
people’s answer. He could tell whether the engineers were defensive or unsure
of themselves.

Going Public
Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being
both broke and a billionaire, Steve Job’s attitude toward wealth was complex. He
was an anti-materialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who
wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a
pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business.
And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.

The MAC is Born

The Reality Distortion Field

In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically
anything.

Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.

Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think
of ourselves that way too, The goal was never to beat the competition, or to
make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little
greater.

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 The Design
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The main thing in our design is that we have to make intuitively obvious.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.

“It want it to be as beautiful as possible, even it’s inside the box. A great
carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though
nobody’s going to see it.

Real artist sign their work

Building the Mac

Enter Sculley
Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he
needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon
Valley history. “We all have a short period of time on this earth” “We probably
only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None
of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I , but my feeling is
I’ve got to accomplish a lot of things while I’m young.

The Launch

Gates and Jobs

Icarus

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 There’s an Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life you make
your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look
back to much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever
you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an
image of you, harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times,
artists have to say, “Bye. I’ve to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.”
And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little
differently.

NeXT
“The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get
lost,” The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love made him wiser and
more mature.

Pixar
Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better.

A Regular Guy
He was both romantic and afraid to be romantic

Family Man
At work, he would focus on what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and on other
matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get him to
engage. In his personal life, he was the same way.

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 Toy Story
“It’s kind of fun to do the Impossible,” Walt Disney once said. That was the type
of attitude that appealed to Jobs. He admired Disney’s obsession with detail and
design, and he felt that there was a natural fit between Pixar and the movie
studio that Disney founded.

The Second Coming

The Restoration
It’s rare that you see an artist in his thirties or forties able to really contribute
something amazing.

“If we stay with Gil as CEO, I think there’s only a 10% chance we will avoid
bankruptcy,” he said. “If we fire him and convince Steve to come take over, we
have 60% chance of surviving. If we fire Gil, don’t get Steve back, and have to
search for new CEO, then we have a 40% chance of surviving.” The board gave
him authority to ask Jobs to return.

His primary focus was on his work. He was frequently aloof from his two younger
daughter, estranged again from Lisa, and often prickly as a husband.

He usually didn’t care one iota what people thought of him; he could cut people
off and never care to speak to them again.

Even his supporter Ed Woolard, who headed the compensation committee,

objected. “At DuPont we never did such a thing,” he said. “You brought me here
to fix this thing, and people are the key,” Jobs argued. When the board proposed
a study that could take two months, Jobs exploded: “Are you nuts ? “ He paused
for a long moment of silence, then continued. “Guys, if you don’t want to do this,
I’m not coming back on Monday. Because I’ve got thousands of key decisions to
make that are far more difficult than this, and if you can’t throw your support
behind this kind of decision, I will fail. So if you can’t do this, I’m out of here, and
you can blame it on me, you can say, “Steve wasn’t up for the job.”

“I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer,” he said. “The
people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this

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 world, and they’re out to change the world. We make tools for those people.”

We too are going to think differently and serve the people who have been buying
our products from the beginning. Because a lot of people think they’re crazy, but
in that craziness we see genius.

Finally, the remaining deal points were resolved. “Bill, thank you for your support
of this company,” Jobs said as he crouched on the empty stage. “I think the
world’s a better place for it.”

Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity — purity of spirit and
love — and I always cry. It always just reaches in and grabs me.

One way to remember who you’re is to remember who your heroes are.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round
pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond
of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them,
disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is
ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the
people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones
who do.

Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of
them— Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King— were
easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a
friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard
Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart.
Most were Job’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had
taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

Jobs didn’t like to be forced to make a decision

“I’ve been back about ten weeks, working really hard,” he said, looking tired but
deeply determined.

“It was rough, really rough, the worst time in my life. I had a young family. I had
Pixar. I would go to work at 7 a.m. and I’d get back at 9 at night, and the kids
would be in bed. And I couldn’t speak, I literally couldn’t, I was so exhausted. I
couldn’t speak to Laurene. All I could do was watch a half hour of TV and
vegetate. It got close to killing me. I was driving up to Pixar and down to Apple in
a black Porsche convertible, and I started to get kidney stones. I would rush to

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 the hospital and the hospital would give me a shot of Demerol in the butt and
eventually I would pass it.

One of Job’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to
do is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies,
and it’s true for products.”

Design Principles

The iMAC

CEO
For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The
best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average
one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the
average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an
attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn’t get
along, they’d hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to
work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players. At pixar, it was a
whole company of A players. When I got back Apple, that’s what I decided to try
to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone,
even if they are going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks
and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about eh
type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn’t nearly as good as
he was, but that’s what I aspired to do.

“I make 50 cents for showing up,” he liked to joke, “and other 50 cents is based
on performance.” Since his return in July 1997, Apple stock had gone from just
under $14 to just over $102 at the peak of the Internet bubble at the beginning of
2000. Woolard had begged him to take at lest a modest stock grant back in
1997, but Jobs had declined, saying, “I don’t want the people I work with at
Apple to think I’m coming back to get rich.” Had he accepted that modest grant,

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 it would have been worth $400 million. Instead he made $2.50 during that
period.

“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said.
“That’s what other companies do.”

For Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better.

The Digital Hub

It was at that moment that Jobs launched a new grand strategy that would
transform Apple—and with it the entire technology industry.

When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He
was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend
to be less innovative. “People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a
record, and they never get out of them” he said. At age forty-five, Jobs was now
about to get out of his groove.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas
first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

One of Job’s talents was spotting markets that were filled with second-rate
products.

Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his
life, Jobs told Markoff. People who had never taken acid would never fully
understand him.

The iTunes Store

I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires
intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real
discipline.

“Steve Job’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get
user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things,” Bill
Gates said.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivation matter.

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 If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra
weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

Music Man
When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Pixar’s Friends
I’m a changed man, I’m finally at peace with myself

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.

“My goal has always been not only to make great products, but to build great
companies,” Jobs later said. “Walt Disney did that. And the way we did the
merger, we kept Pixar as a great company and helped Disney remain one as
well.”

Twenty-First Century Macs

The sophistication comes from minimalism.

Jobs later admitted that he had overdesigned and overpriced the Cube, just as
he had the NeXT computer. But gradually he was learning his lesson. In building
devices like the iPod, he would control the costs and make the trade offs
necessary to get them launched on time and on budget.

Round One
“He has that ability to ignore stuff he doesn’t want to confront”

Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a
story.” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story. And that was

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 the approach Jobs chose. “Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he
began. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a

beginner again, less sure about everything.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever
encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything
—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these
things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you’re going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of
thinking you have something to lose. You’re already naked. There is no reason
not to follow your heart.

“I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that,
you know, is hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different and I
think it’s magical. And in that case, wow” Bill Gates said.

The iPhone
Jobs went into the office the next day, gathered his team, and said, “I want to
make a tablet, and it can’t have a keyboard or a stylus.” Users would be able to
type by touching the screen with their fingers. That meant the screen needed to
have a feature that became known as multi-touch, the ability to process multiple
inputs at the same time. “So could you guys come up with multi-touch, touch
sensitive display for me?” he asked. It took them about six months, but they
came up with a crude but workable prototype.

Round Two

The iPad

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 New Battles

To Infinity
The Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had
first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had once a year ever since.

It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton

Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something
are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be left
behind. I’m going to take MobileMe and make it free, and we’re going to make
syncing content simple. We are building a server farm in North Carolina. We can
provide all the syncing you need, and that way we can lock in the customer.

Round Three
“Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not extraordinary in
every realm,” Powell said. “He doesn’t have social graces, such as putting
himself in other people’s shores, but he cares deeply about empowering
humankind, the advancement of humankind, and putting the right tools in their
hands.”

“I’ve had a very lucky career, a very lucky life,” he replied. “I’ve done all that I can
do.”

Legacy
The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products begins
with his most salient trait: his intensity. His silences could be as searing as his
rants; he had taught himself to stare without blinking. Sometimes this intensity
was charming, in a geeky way, such as when product he was unveiling at that
moment was the most amazing thing that Apple had ever made.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that “nature loves simplicity and
unity.” So did Steve Jobs.

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 Job’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim
his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him
—the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and
iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store—he was relentless.

He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It
honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that
was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on
minimalism.

Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so
my mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally, Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative
leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. he was, indeed, an
example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius,
someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than
mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information,
sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.

I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to
their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about and I usually
turn out be right.

I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I

remember the time when Reed was six years old, coming home, and I had just
fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his
family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody’s
got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was
excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.

If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for
being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I
didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food,
none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our
species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute
something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying
to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we
can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we
do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the

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 contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what
has driven me.

“I like to think that something survives after you die,” Jobs said. “It’s strange to
think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it
just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe
your consciousness endures.”

Epilogue
And thus it was that at the end, Steve Jobs was surrounded by a deeply loving
family. He may not always have seemed like the best family man, as he often
admitted. But any judgments must take into account results. As a business
leader, he could be demanding and temperamental, but he forged a fanatically
loyal team of colleagues, who loved him dearly. Likewise, as a family man, he
could be abrupt and distracted, but he had a marriage that was a deeply
romantic full partnership with a strong woman, and he produced four well-
grounded children who surrounded him with love at the end. That Tuesday
afternoon, he kept staring into his children’s eyes. At one point he looked at
Patty and his children for a long time, then at Laurene, and finally gazed past
them into distance. “Oh wow,” he said. “Oh wow. Oh wow”

Steve Jobs died, with members of his family around him, touching him.

“His mind was never a captive of reality,” Laurene said. “He possessed an epic
sense of possibility. He looked at things from the standpoint of perfection.”

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