I’m
a big fan of Steve Jobs. When Icon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act
in the History of Business came out in 2005, I got a copy – even if
it was an unauthorized biography. Last week, I downloaded the kindle edition of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson – the authorized biography. It’s USD11.99 for the kindle version vs USD35 for the hard cover.
Anyway, as a background, the author, Isaacson, is a former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time Magazine. He has also written biographies of Eintein, Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger. Whoa...
How did the book come about? It was Jobs who asked Isaacson to write his biography. He persistently asked Isaacson since 2004 but Isaacson kept on deflecting his suggestion until Jobs’ wife called Isaacson in 2009 to tell him that if he were going to write the biography, he has to do it now because Jobs was sick.
Jobs gave Isaacson full control over the book and waived his right to see it in advance. His only involvement was choosing the cover art. (Very consistently Jobs til the end.)
Anyway, I’ve just read about a fifth of the book and it’s hard to put it down. Here are some interesting tidbits which I don’t remember reading from iCon (btw, I love Steve Wozniak too):
- Jobs and Wozniak created a thing called Blue Box which enables you to call long distance and overseas calls for free. They used if for fun and pranks. The most daring was when they called the Vatican and Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope!
- One time, Jobs needed to raise funds to buy a car. He and Wozniak looked at help-wanted postings in a school bulletin board and discovered that the Westgate Shopping Center in San Jose was seeking college students who could dress up in costumes and amuse the kids. For $3 an hour, Jobs, Wozniak, and Jobs’ gf wore costumes to play Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the White Rabbit!
- When Jobs proposed to Wozniak that they put up their own company and sell Wozniak’s new computer design, Wozniak felt that he had to offer it first to HP (his employer). He demonstrated the new computer model to his managers in 1976 and though the senior executive at the meeting was impressed, and seemed torn, he said it was not something HP could develop. (Too bad for HP!)
- When Jobs and Wozniak formed the Apple partnership, they were actually 3, the third was a guy named Wayne. They split the ownership 45-45-10. But 11 days after they signed the partnership papers, Wayne got cold feet and withdrew since it was a partnership (not a corporation) and they will be personally liable to creditors should the business go bad. Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010, it would have been worth approximately $2.6 billion! Instead, in 2010, he was living alone in a small home in Nevada, where he played penny slot machines and lived off his social security check. But what’s admirable about Wayne is he had no regrets. He said “I made the best decision for me at the time. Both of them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride.”
There's so much to learn from Jobs but here are my favorite excerpts from the book:
On Jobs’ view on money:
I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.
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On Jobs’ famous reality distortion field:
Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest as Jobs was tactical, marveled at how effective it could be. “His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future, such as telling me that I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.” When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they were almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”
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On how he got people to do what seems impossible:
One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”
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On hiring A+ players:
“I’ve learned over the years that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained. “By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the pain.”
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On his unparalleled passion on craftmanship:
One of the most extreme—and telling—implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said. “But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.” One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.” Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if 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.”
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time.
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On how he wants to conduct product review process:
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
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On his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address (he was supposed to get help
from the scriptwriter of “A Few Good Men”, Aaron Sorkin, but Sorkin never got around submitting anything to Jobs so Jobs ended up writing it himself – his first time to write a speech.):
“Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life,” he began. “That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.” The first was about dropping out of Reed College. “I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.” The second was about how getting fired from Apple turned out to be good for him. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” The students were unusually attentive, despite a plane circling overhead with a banner that exhorted “recycle all e-waste,” and it was his third tale that enthralled them. It was about being diagnosed with cancer and the awareness it brought: 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 are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
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On why he wanted his biography written (talking to the author, Isaacson):
“I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did. Also, when I got sick, I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say.” He had never, in two years, asked anything about what I was putting in the book or what conclusions I had drawn. But now he looked at me and said, “I know there will be a lot in your book I won’t like.” It was more a question than a statement, and when he stared at me for a response, I nodded, smiled, and said I was sure that would be true. “That’s good,” he said. “Then it won’t seem like an in-house book. I won’t read it for a while, because I don’t want to get mad. Maybe I will read it in a year—if I’m still around.”
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On market research:
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.
On the intersection of art & science:
Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science.
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On what has driven him:
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 contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.
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On his view about death:
One sunny afternoon, when he wasn’t feeling well, Jobs sat in the garden behind his house and reflected on death. He talked about his experiences in India almost four decades earlier, his study of Buddhism, and his views on reincarnation and spiritual transcendence. “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God,” he said. “For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.” He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die,” he 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.” He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”
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I also liked Isaacson’s analysis about Jobs -
He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.
I tremendously enjoyed reading the book – knowing more about Jobs and the stories behind the Apple products we use. I’ll never look at Apple products the same way again.
I also enjoyed Isaacson’s writing so much so that I downloaded his biography of Albert Einstein right after I finished reading Steve Jobs. Now I just have to find the time to read it. :)