Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What would Steve Jobs think of me waiting over five years to read his biography, patiently waiting for it to go on sale? Judging from what author Walter Isaacson writes, Jobs would probably yell at me, call me a bozo, cry and then the next day tell me how smart I was for waiting.
Or something like that.
Switching back and forth between his career at Apple (and Pixar and–briefly–at NeXT) and his personal life, Isaacson uses quotes from Jobs’ family, friends and workers, along with a generous supply of quotes from Jobs himself gathered from numerous interviews to assemble a portrait of a driven, intense man who apparently had none of the inhibitions or controls that keep most people at least relatively polite. Jobs would hurl insults and blast designs, products and people alike when he saw them as lacking. He analyzed others with an unsympathetic eye and then used his relentless verbal assaults to demand what he wanted–and often got great results.
But not always.
The quest for perfect design and end-to-end control of products led him and Apple to create amazing and well-crafted consumer devices–the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone. But the same forces that drove him to be so demanding also blinded him to stick with designs that didn’t work (hello, original iMac mouse), to be needlessly cruel to employees and create distance with members of his own family.
He indulged in offbeat diets–long fasts, periods of eating just a single type of fruit, while also eschewing personal hygiene, believing that the diets would keep his body clean and pure. How he could not detect his own body odor after not showering for weeks at a time is perhaps an example of the “reality distortion field” he projected, even on himself.
It was his devotion to odd diets and alternative medicine that delayed proper treatment on his cancer for nine long months and ultimately contributed to his death at 56.
Isaacson portrays Jobs as a genius but also an immensely flawed person, often correcting assertions Jobs makes in the interviews spread throughout the book. In the end, I was left with a picture of Jobs as someone who had an excellent eye for design, an almost insane drive for perfection and both the charisma and chutzpah to woo and wallop people as he saw fit (and he often wooed and walloped the same person, sometimes on the same day). Any admiration you might have is tempered by his often odious personality.
One disappointment with the biography is how it ends. There is a coda that lets Jobs speak about his legacy in his own words and a list of his achievements but, perhaps because the book was rushed to press shortly after his death, there is little that touches on his final days or the events and reactions following his death. In that sense, the biography feels a bit incomplete.
Still, this lengthy examination of Jobs’ life presents a vivid portrait of a distinct personality and how that personality forged one company into a massive success by fully engaging on his strengths. Some at Apple–notably Tim Cook–claim that the treatment of Jobs here is unfair and inaccurate and there is a sense that a certain amount of cherry-picking to highlight the narrative is taking place, but at the same time it’s clear that Isaacson is on the mark on all the major aspects of Jobs.
Recommended.
