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Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs

I suppose this could be considered to contain spoilers, so if you want an un-spoiled reading of the book, it’s probably best to skip this until you’ve finished it. 

Some thoughts:

1. Boy, he sure does cry a lot. 
2. And he has an eating disorder, basically. 
3. It seems to me that in many ways Steve might have been manic depressive or bipolar. The eating weirdly stuff. The moods. The yelling at people. The denying of reality that didn’t work for him. The crying. I dunno. He seemed a lot more tormented in this than I ever really thought about him being. 
4. I like that Steve is into meetings. Meetings can be good. I’m tired of all this anti-meeting nonsense. A badly run meeting doesn’t prove that meetings can’t be useful. 
5. The Bill Clinton/Monica conversation was kind of amazing. 
6. Actually, I got really interested in his methods of conversations and negotiating. Walks. He loved walks. That seems kind of genius, and I kind of want to use walks. Its nicer than just grabbing coffee or spending all your times in bars. The other thing that struck me was how he would just drop by people’s houses unannounced, and how people would just come by his house. So very california. No one in New York drops by houses, no one has meetings in their house. It’s like a whole different world. 
7. The garden behind his house sounds kind of amazing. Bees. Honey. Fruit. Pumpkins. Giant patches of sunflowers made into playhouses for his kids. I would love to see a picture of it. I like that. 
8. The Gorilla Glass story was super awesome. 
9. I wish that Isaacson dug more into Steve’s lack of philanthropy. He makes a few casual mentions to Steve not being super into the Philanthropy thing, but never really digs. He makes passing mentions to the Apple Foundation, trying to get computers into the schools, and that he was a founding donor and original board member of Larry Brilliant’s Seva foundation, but really he didn’t do too much. His wife does some charity work, and one wonders if they evolved into one of those relationships where the guy makes the money and the girl gives it away, but it doesn’t seem exactly like that, since there aren’t really any reports of the jobs giving institutions a lot of money. I dunno, I think it’s kind of weird. I mean, he’s not like Gates where he made SO MUCH money, and he was probably just so fixated on staying alive for the last few years but… still. I would have liked it to read a direct answer to a direct question about it. 
10. And on that note, it’s clear to me now that Steve was much, much more sick than I thought at the time for a long, long time. And after getting all the details, it seems pretty clear that that 8 months between discovery and his first surgery did probably do him in in the end. 
11. It also strikes me that all of those conversations about Steve mellowing as he got older are untrue. It sort of leaves an enigma of how he became such a better CEO as he got older, because it’s clear we can’t just chalk it up to mellowing. The “No Bozos, everyone an A Player” thing seems to be the closest explanation. He also seemed to get better at delegating. 
12. The story about the yacht he was building was downright heartbreaking. I wonder what will become of it. 
13. This was such a great book because it has so many little stories, so many little details you’ve just never heard before. I mean, the big revelations in the book that weren’t already known are sort of already out - that Steve was working on television, etc. But some of the stories are just amazing. The whole process of getting fired. Pixar’s had some great books about it written and so has Apple, but the NeXT years were particularly interesting, because I didn’t know so much about them. Interesting about the genesis about the glass staircase starting at the NeXT offices. I’d like to see some photos of that place.
14. The privacy thing is sort of weird for me, I wrestle with it. I’m sort of obsessed with Steve Jobs, obviously. But he was just SO relentlessly private. Which makes all of these little details int he book so amazing because so little of it really ever came out during his life (he was building a yacht?? he wanted to make ads for Obama??? Lisa’s mom sold the house Steve bought Lisa?) So you feel kinda weird reading about them, because he was so private about it all. It makes you feel a little bit guilty in a way. Except, of course, he condoned this whole affiar, and knew it was coming. And, of course, I’m not really private in that way, but people have the right to be different in that way. Still, though, it felt a little… tawdry and voyeuristic reading about some of these things, especially the dating, family stuff, the episodes of making out in the offices (um.. ew) and whatnot.
15. I did walk away thinking a bit differently about him. He was pointlessly mean, I think. Isaacson flat out says in the end it probably hurt him as much as it helped in his life. He defends it by saying that people need to be honest and bring their a game, but of course using words like “bozo, shit, crap,” and “idiot” aren’t any more honest than “incorrect, not good enough, a mistake” and “wrongheaded.” Honesty does not have to mean degradation. And he also would claim, repeatedly, “that’s just who I am.” I’ve never felt good about that excuse for anything, and there’s a telling aside in the book about how Jobs knew Jony Ive was important enough to never intentionally be mean to flat out indicates he’s able to not do it when it serves his interests. 

I think people often take the wrong things away from Jobs. There’s a lot going on in his success. Open/Closed. Design/technology. asshole/RDF, Attention to detail, flat organizations, constant communications, willingness to halt everything and start over if things aren’t perfect. I see a lot of young entrepreneurs take away from Steve to believe that they are always right, that they need to stick to their guns, but I don’t see any evidence of that in Steve. He routinely changed his mind, he routinely backed down (though without admitting it usually) and he routinely pivoted. The other thing is that he was relentless in finding the best partners and coworkers. I see many a Steve Jobs wannabe out there who doesn’t have the courage to fire someone then they’re not working out just as often as I see wannabes who fire people for pointless reasons. It was an art, he mentions the difficulties in it once or twice in the book. I wish there was more about that. 

Umm.. that’s all I got for now. I took about a hundred notes on the Kindle, I’ll be going through them in the coming days.