I finished this book last night. It’s good. You should read it. So much has already been written about the book, but there is some stuff in it that just amazed me.
- Jobs spent years eating at a restaurant his biological father ran. He didn’t know that the man whose restaurant he was eating in was his father and his father didn’t know the Jobs was his son. They even shook hands at one point.
- Right up to taking Apple back over, Jobs made about about $3B worth of mistakes (his ouster from Apple, Next’s limited success, and Pixar losing money for so long). This was, in effect, $3B worth of business lessons, knowledge and training that set him up for Apple’s resurgence in the 90s. Through it all, he maintained a maniacal belief in himself.
- Before he died, he had a long conversation with Larry Page about focus. Lots of Google products have since been chopped.
- He asked Aaron Sorkin to help him with his Stanford commencement speech. Sorkin never got back to him.
- When John Mayer was 27, Jobs used to have him round for dinner regularly and considered him the best guitarist in the world.
“John Mayer is one of the best guitar players who’s ever lived, and I’m just afraid he’s blowing it big time … I think he’s a really good kid underneath, but he’s just been out of control.”
- Through the Jobs lens, all companies, regardless of size, reflect their founders. Actually, this is one of the best parts of the book. Seeing Gates and Murdoch and Iger and Eisner and Ellison through Jobs’ prism of reference.
- Apple’s design team worked on an ‘Applefied’ version of The Daily at the same time the News Corp team did. Jobs preferred the News Corp version.
- On the night of his greatest success, the launch of the iPad, Jobs was depressed:
“As we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone. I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, “Fuck you, how can you do that?” I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, “Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.” And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit.”
The book is filled with so many amazing insights – Jobs’ two hour chat with Dylan, Jobs’ frequent crying, Jobs’ insufferable personality in his 20s, Jobs’ chats with Clinton and Obama, his relationship with Joan Baez and his unwillingness to soften or cede ground, even at his weakest.
Whatever you make of him personally, it was a truly amazing life.
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I find the “maniacal belief in himself” that you mentioned really inspiring. In the Stanford commencement speech he gets to the source of this confidence – a combination of faith and a life devoted to doing what he loved. He says “You have to trust in something…because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path and that will make all the difference.” What is most challenging for me is achieving that level of faith amidst change because it means relinquishing control when my instinct is to fight my way back to homeostasis. Do you struggle with that as well? I’ve been working on a different approach lately which is trying to use external change as a springboard for personal change. That way I evolve with the external change and I feel like I have some measure of control back. Evolution takes quite a bit of time and effort though!