This is what we find after finishing Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the authorized biography which rocketed to the top of the Amazon charts after its release Monday. It is without a doubt the year's hardest-to-ignore book. (For myself especially, having interviewed Jobs many times and having worked for Walter at Time magazine, resistance was always going to be useless.)
Indeed, the past few days have felt like belonging to a book club that encompasses the entire tech world. If you listen closely to Mashable this week, you can almost hear the soft tapping of page-forward buttons and iPad screens. So here are a few first impressions and discussion points we'd like to bring up at that book club meeting.
What left the deepest impression in your reading? Let us know in the comments.
Jobs thought different … about deodorant.
Steve Jobs cared about tiny details, and the best biographies are all about them — the impressionistic traits that really shape your understanding of a whole person. In Jobs' case, one of those would have to be the fact that he spent decades insisting his vegan diet would naturally clear up any body odor issues. All you need is fruit. It was an early but persistent example of what Isaacson calls Jobs' "magical thinking."
Jobs reveled in his role of Chief Bully … and so did many of those he bullied.
Before and after his restoration at Apple, Jobs had one go-to management tool: to get better performance out of your staff, yell, belittle and badmouth the bejesus out of them, often seven days a week and late into the night. Many Apple employees quit under this constant drill sergeant-style pressure; many more were fired. Still more were inspired to do what they called the best work of their careers. But could he have been nicer about it and gotten the same results? Probably so, Isaacson concludes.
Ultimate design nerd … or obsessive-compulsive?
Jobs sweated every detail in his life and work. He lived a spartan existence on the floors of his mansions, largely because he could not bring himself to chose a single sofa or bed frame. He would chew employees out over a few frames removed from an ad, or the thickness of a line in a calculator widget. He had more than 100 black turtlenecks from the same designer in his closet. Tired and hallucinating during his liver transplant operation, he demanded the doctors bring him five models of oxygen mask to test. We always knew Jobs was a design nerd, but his degree of focus still surprises.
Let the tears flow.
When Jobs wasn't obsessing, it seems, he was tearing up. Practically every chapter in the book features some instance of Jobs crying, quite often when he didn't get his way with product design or corporate organization. But Jobs would also cry happy tears when encountering what he thought of as "purity of spirit" — such as the copy for the first "Think Different" TV ad.
He was a romantic … but not the best at romance.
One of the most biggest head-scratchers in the book comes when Jobs is dating folk singer Joan Baez, who is famous but not wealthy, and keeps telling her about a Ralph Lauren dress she'd look great in. Finally, on date night, Jobs drives her to the store with the dress — only to pick up a few shirts for himself and suggest she buy the dress herself. Another girlfriend, one of the loves of his life, would come to believe that he had Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
His stubbornness about health and food hurt him.
The hardest detail to take, for those of us still grieving the loss of Jobs, is that he waited nearly a year to have the operation on his first, perfectly curable tumor, allowing it to spread. This was because he didn't want his body to be violated by surgery, Jobs told Isaacson with a note of regret. He would also fast or eat minimal fruit diets when doctors were urging him to bulk up and eat more protein.
Jobs met his birth father … but not really.
Syrian student Abdulfattah Jandali, the father of the baby given to the Jobs family for adoption, lived an itinerant life, at one point running a restaurant near Cupertino. Jobs' birth sister, novelist Mona Simpson, discovered that Jobs had eaten in the restaurant several times and shook Jandali's hand without either man knowing the significance from it. Still, Jobs never responded to Jandali's request for a proper meeting.
There's a Jobs boat waiting to be built.
The Apple founder could not stop designing newer and greater things. Even during his long bouts of sickness, he was hard at work designing a sea-going vessel, perhaps to compete with his yacht-loving friend Larry Ellison. It was, of course, a very minimalist and tasteful boat design.
Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch: Unlikely friends.
Jobs formed a friendship with Murdoch during his later years, after persuading the media mogul to create content for the iPad, and would frequently invite him to dinner — to the dismay of many of Jobs' liberal friends. But Jobs was no right-winger (he offered to do the ads for Obama's reelection campaign), and did take Murdoch to task for what Jobs saw as the "destructive" nature of Fox News.
Even after 40 interviews, Jobs remains an enigma.
Isaacson put Jobs on the record 40 times over two years. Yet, as many reviewers have pointed out, for all these quirks, it's still a somewhat thin portrait. Jobs shuts down a lot of lines of questions, and keeps many answers ambivalent (such as his "fifty-fifty" belief in life after death.) What was it like to actually live in Steve Jobs' head? Answering that question still requires some magical thinking on the part of the reader.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Airtel Nigeria.
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