I.
If you ask most people what makes them a good person, generally they will give you some estimation of how nice they are to others. They will talk about how they recycle, or how they held the door for an old woman, or how they engage in similar acts of kindness throughout the day. For most people, being the best they can be and being nice are the same thing.
Enter Steve Jobs.
Most people think of Steve Jobs as either a petulant man-child who demanded his own way in even the most pointless circumstances, or as a visionary whose ability to understand how regular people use technology in their daily lives catapulted the entire world into the Information Age. Walter Isaacson’s definitive biography of his life, Steve Jobs, portrays a man who was simultaneously both. Despite being released very soon after Jobs’s death, the book is nonetheless an extremely relevant read today, almost a decade later.
I think the reason for this is because the book is a high-fidelity representation of a man whose inability to even basically progress on some social levels was not a serious obstacle for him to make a positive impact on the world. Despite many stories in the book about Jobs’s frequent tantrums (“‘Let’s stop this bullshit!’ he kept shouting”), I nonetheless walked away thinking that on the whole, the world is a better place because of Jobs’s existence. That’s in part due to Isaacson’s extremely measured style of writing. He alternates between anecdotes about Jobs’s immaturity and vision with relative ease. There are few points in the book where the reader cannot both empathize with Jobs and yet feel kind of vaguely put off by him. In this way, Isaacson puts the reader in the place of those closest to Jobs: kind of like a tour of his famous reality distortion field. It’s a little jarring at first, but that’s hardly Isaacson’s fault. Job’s life was riddled with contradictions.
One might ask how much of the book is, in fact, a clear representation of Jobs’s life, due to the aforementioned distortion field. Reassuringly, Isaacson presents a list of his efforts to be objective in the book’s opening, including interviews with figures who had much reason to love or hate Jobs.
To check and flesh out his story, I interviewed more than a hundred friends, relatives, competitors, adversaries, and colleagues.
These people include Bill Gates, Laurene Powell, early Apple engineers, Jony Ive, and more. Isaacson also indicates the possibility of the Rashomon Effect taking place in these interviews. All of this contributes to the air of mystery and awe around Jobs- just who was this man who inspired such love, hate, and adulation?
II.
The book is impressive because it somehow answers this question. Despite being fairly short at less than 700 pages, it nonetheless somehow gives a nuanced portrayal of Jobs’s life and steers away from leaning too heavily to one side in the “visionary vs man-child” debate. At the end, Isaacson briefly gives his own opinion of Jobs’s life. This feels like catharsis because, during the few times when Isaacson editorializes before this, it’s almost always to disprove some “fact” that Jobs is claiming or provide context to something that Jobs was avoiding. So when Isaacson does give his opinion, it feels very earned. Two quotes from this section stand out to me in particular:
Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.
This may feel like puffing up of Jobs. In the context of the book that precedes this quote, nothing could be more wrong. A genius, as portrayed in this book, is someone who is truly world-class at something, but fundamentally flawed. Jobs could not have been who he was if he had fixed his underlying problems. Which leads me to the next quote:
Most people have a regulator between their mind and their mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. “My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it,” he said. This made his charismatic and inspiring, yet also, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.
And he truly was. At times, Jobs comes across as shockingly cruel. There are anecdotes about him refusing to grant founder stock to a co-founder for no apparent reason. His regular habit of parking in handicapped spots both amused and annoyed his co-workers. And, perhaps most egregiously, he refused to acknowledge his own daughter’s existence for several years.
And yet, by the end of the book I’m wishing that Jobs was still around, reinventing one more industry or even just making one more device. How can these facts be reconciled?
III.
I think the answer lies in the fact that Jobs was kind of a child in several ways. For some reason, he never lost the wonder and curiosity that is almost ubiquitous to small children. And he also never lost the cruelty that children often display. To this day some of the most abjectly mean things I’ve ever heard have come from children. They simply have no filter. Neither did Jobs. This would also explain his frequent crying fits when things did not go his way. He was simply reacting emotionally, as all children do.
This is an interesting idea to me, and the book doesn’t really dive into it the way I might expect it to. Again, the book is short, and again, Isaacson isn’t much for editorializing, so fair enough, I guess. But there are so many stories of people overcoming struggles by growing up, by learning to follow rules, by becoming socialized. In fiction, this usually takes the form of the Hero’s Journey. However, Jobs does none of these things and stull succeeds. In a huge way. That’s not to say he doesn’t grow at all throughout the book. Jobs’s initial run at Apple can be contrasted with his later return. But while he did improve, he never really got to the level of a normal person. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, were he still alive today, he still wouldn’t be at that level. But Isaacson makes me ask if I would really want him to.
Does this mean that the Hero’s Journey is baseless and real life is a lot less optimistic? I don’t think so. I still think that the average person should probably try to pick up some social skills and maybe work on their LinkedIn or something. It’s just interesting to read about someone who doesn’t do that kind of thing, and moreover, someone for whom that kind of thing would not have worked. I think the Hero’s Journey has such broad appeal because many find it’s a great template towards self-improvement. This leads us to forget that there are some people for whom that might not be the best path. I won’t be parking in any handicapped spots anytime soon, but I do think it’s valuable that the story of someone like that exists. It’s a testament to Isaacson’s work that I hope the next Steve Jobs reads this book.
This opens the door to a concerning question- which rules should really apply to the truly exceptional in our society? Obviously there are some rules which everyone should follow- murder is probably wrong regardless of if you’re about to invent the smartphone. But if we had to give up handicapped parking spaces to get a few more Steve Jobses in the world, would that be the worst trade?
This postulation fails to take one crucial thing into account, though. If it wasn’t against the rules to park there, Jobs probably wouldn’t have done it. He absolutely enjoyed being a contrarian and rebel. Almost all of his work incorporates punk and hacker ideology, at least on the surface level. So even if a mystical and perfect cost/benefit analysis showed that a net positive happens when the exceptional can park in handicapped spaces, they’d probably just start reckless driving instead.
I think this discussion is much broader than this book review or even this book. But Steve Jobs did open my mind to that possibility. I guess even after Jobs was gone, he was still making people think different.