I bought this weighty tome from Costco for $20, expecting that it was just an impulse buy. But once I started to soak in Walter Isaacson’s prose, I was hooked. I carried this book with me for a week, sometimes shielding it from onlookers, because I knew that the subject of this biography was a controversial character. My friends told me that they hated Steve, but I kept reading. And I became immersed in the life of this man, who was abandoned as a child and given up for adoption, who was raised by two loving parents, who realized he was smarter than his own father and feared that power. And in my life – in the lives of all of us college goers from first generation parents who never went – his story was hauntingly relevant. Only recently did I realize that I was getting smarter and manlier than my small father, and it bothered me. But knowing that Steve Jobs went through it comforted me. He spoke into me.
Perhaps he spoke into the author too. Isaacson went through hundreds of interviews to create this collection of stories and quotes from Steve Jobs life. But he does not remain fully objective. He inserts his own subjective judgments on the text. He’d judge certain products, or Pixar movies, or other tech gear in a manner similar to that of Jobs, as the best of as a failure. And I wonder if this mannerism in Isaacson’s writing is not a product of speaking to Steve Jobs for this extended period of time. After all, Steve was a master of judgment. He had a dichotomy of reactions to those products his teams presented him: either it was a piece of shit or the best thing the world has ever seen. He maintained a reality distortion field in his own mind, and he believed the fiction so powerfully that it permeated into whoever he shared his vision with. Reading how Isaacson sometimes goes into superlatives – remembering that he’s supposed to be the objective biographer – raises up the interesting prospect that perhaps Jobs did change him, and that perhaps Job’s personality can still bring about change. Maybe he can change us too.
If we pick and choose the good traits, I think that everyone can learn something by reading this book, something deep in themselves through Steve Jobs: the castigating leader transparent enough to weep when he lost the fight, the visionary who distorted reality consistently in order to produce a better world, an obsessive individual hellbent on making in a dent in the universe and hence doing so.
I took away one main message from the 600+ pages. I recommend reading the whole book to anyone who reads this post. But if not, then let me convey how Steve Jobs changed the world and how we can all copy him. He created his tech empire not through extensive market research or a care for anyone’s judgments. He did this through a simple belief in the beauty of the product. And we can all learn not to care too much about our own reputations, but get down to the deep core of why we’re working: to write the best book, to paint the best picture, to engineer the best bridge, to create the most organized spreadsheet. To get to the heart of why we work and do it darn well. That’s how we can make a dent in the universe.
