“Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

Until a few weeks ago, the biography I read most recently was Dutch, Edmund Morris’s authorized portrait of Ronald Reagan. I read it not because I was interested in Reagan, but because Morris did something unique: he inserted himself into Reagan’s story as a (mostly) fictional character. Why would he do that? Morris grew up in Kenya, far from Reagan’s childhood in Illinois, not to mention years later. And yet there he was, a peripheral character throughout the story of Reagan’s life. What was the point?

Reading the book, the most striking thing about Reagan was how impenetrable he was. No one ever got through to him, to really know him. Perhaps it’s because there was no there there, or maybe there was an interesting person under the bland exterior he used to keep everyone out. It was impossible to know.

Such a personality must frustrate biographers. I want a deep understanding of the subject of a biography, to know what makes her tick, what her motivations and drives are. I want to get inside her head. But Morris couldn’t do that with Reagan. No one could.

I hypothesize that Morris stuck himself in the story, calling it a “Memoir of Ronald Reagan,” to contrast his subject with someone who’s head he could get into. And through that contrast, he drew out a little bit of something to demonstrate what made Reagan tick. Not a lot mind you, but it was an interesting attempt.

I thought about this as I read Steve Jobs, an authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. I’ve been a fan of Apple’s products and vision for many years, but never delved deeply into the wealth of literature on Jobs himself or personal stories such as the birth of the Mac. My main exposure to Steve has been through his keynote presentations and various interviews and appearances over the years. I watch Apple relatively closely, but not Steve. In reading the biography, I wanted to get to know him, to get a feel for the man, and, above all, to find out what makes him tick.

Steve Jobs did give me a feel for the man. Many of the stories about his personality appear to be true. Steve Jobs was clearly a tyrant, but a tyrant with taste. I was struck by the constant theme that Jobs somehow believed that the usual rules don’t apply to him. At one point, pulled over for driving over 100 MPH, Jobs impatiently waits for the ticket, even demanding that the Chippy hurry up. Ticket at last in hand, he drives right up over 100 MPH again, despite a warning that he could lose his license.

Jobs’s famed reality distortion field let him pretend that rules didn’t apply to him, that the world was exactly what he imagined it to be. This ability had advantages (cajoling the CEO of Corning to complete the “impossible” task to start producing huge volumes of Gorilla Glass virtually over night) and disadvantages (trying to cure his cancer with extreme diets).

It was that supreme confidence, combined with his taste, that shaped Jobs’s career and the success of Apple. When it comes to taste, Steve was continually, obsessively product-focused. The quality of the products had to be top notch. You get a feeling for this not so much in the successes of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, which are well-known, but on the things that shouldn’t matter. Deathly ill following his liver transplant, Jobs was still Jobs:

At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. The doctors looked at Powell, puzzled. She was finally able to distract him so they could put on the mask. He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex. He suggested ways it could be designed more simply. “He was very attuned to every nuance of the environment and objects around him, and that drained him,” Powell recalled.

This is perhaps the most striking of many examples of Jobs’s obsession with quality and taste, and deftly captures the essence of it. I imagine Jobs thought about how to improve things in his life every second of his life. In his dreams, he might be improving the design of his pajamas or bedroom dresser.

The product obsession drives the book’s narrative, right down to its organization. A few chapters necessarily cover personal events, such as early years, love and marriage, and illness. More are organized around products. Relevant chapter titles:

4: Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design

5: The Apple I: Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In…

6: The Apple II: Dawn of a New Age

8: Xerox and Lisa: Graphical User Interfaces

10: The Mac is Born: You Say You Want a Revolution

12: Design: Real Artists Simplify

13: Building the Mac: The Journey is the Reward

15: The Launch: A Dent in the Universe

18: NeXT: Prometheus Unbound

19: Pixar: Technology Meets Art

22: Toy Story: Buzz and Woody to the Rescue

27: The iMac: Hello (Again)

29: Apple Stores; Genius Bars and Sienna Sandstone

30: The Digital Hub: From iTunes to the iPod

31: The iTunes Store: I’m the Pied Piper

34: Twenty-first-century Macs: Setting Apple Apart

36: The iPhone: Three Revolutionary Products in One

38: The iPad: Into the Post-PC Era

40: To Infinity: The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond

That’s nearly half of them, and all but a few of the others also include extensive discussion of products and design. Clearly Jobs was a man obsessed, that obsession shaped every facet of his life, and it therefore shaped the narrative of his biography.

But where does this come from? From whence derives the absolute faith in even the most most questionable ideas, the unwavering belief in his own infallibility, the near complete obsession with the design of everyday things? I see the ticks, but what makes him tick?

The truth is we don’t know. Isaacson doesn’t know. Sure, there are a few hypotheses about his adoption, about his parents insisting he was special. But I don’t know. Explaining Steve Jobs by his adoption seems like a cop-out. There are millions of adopted people, many with no doubt similar histories (educated biological parents, doting middle-class adoptive parents). But there’s only one Steve Jobs. Jobs himself didn’t buy it, saying he hardly thought about his adoption.

There is also discussion of his study of Zen Buddhism, and his love for simple, beautiful places like Kyoto and Kona Village. I’ve studied a bit of Zen Buddhism and visited Kyoto and Kona Village too, and have a deep appreciation for the beauty of all three. But I’m no Steve Jobs. Perhaps Steve dove very deeply into Zen Buddhism, so that through years of study and practice he became who he was (though, let’s face it, his personality couldn’t be much less Zen). But if so, I think it gets short shrift in Isaacson’s telling.

Perhaps it’s unfair to demand so much of a biographer. I want to go into the head of his subject, on a quest for a deeper understanding of the essence of the person, and come away with a greater knowledge his humanity. Such was impossible for Morris to do with Reagan, and it’s not fair to expect more of Isaacson with Steve Jobs. Not only was Jobs a deeply complex man with an impenetrable presence (one wonders how well Laurene Powell really got to know him; I’d like to read her book), but, hey, how much can one understand anyone else? People have been trying for centuries to understand Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin (including Isaacson!), with, let’s face it, limited success. It’s rare that a biography becomes so completely deep and authoritative — so true, the definitive telling — that no more biographies follow. More often new folks come along, taking different tacks to understand the ticks. Perhaps the best sense we get of an elephant is through the descriptions of all the blind people feeling different parts of the elephant.

I think my favorite tidbit from the book is Jobs playing a rare bootleg CD with a dozen taped sessions of the Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a gift from Andy Hertzfeld. Listening to the CD with Isaacson, Jobs talks about how the Beatles kept iterating, kept improving the song, working on every aspect over a period of time, getting it “closer to perfect.” Then he says:

The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we’d make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It’s a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon its like, “Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?”

So maybe it’s fair that the narrative is largely product-driven. Jobs talked often over the years about how important good products are to him, much more important than profit, and the book reinforces that. He lived and breathed taste and products, to the exclusion of all else, including, at times, his family and his health.

Perhaps, then, what made Jobs tick was the iPhone and the iPad, and the exultation of being a part of creating a truly inspiring product.