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Steve Jobs Lives...
HOW DO YOU know he's not in the next room or across the country in a meeting? We're still talking about him. He might as well be here, right? In fact, everyday millions upon millions of people are using something that Steve Jobs nearly lost his mind over to create for our enjoyment. Up until his last breath after saying what his sister describes as his final words - "Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow" - Steve Jobs was still making plans for the future and living fully on his journey. Now that's the way to live! Why worry about "off" or "on" switches when you get that life is about transitions.
I became convinced Steve Jobs lives in our hearts, pockets, minds, and homes after hearing his biographer - Walter Isaacson on April 14, 2012. The biographer of Einstein, Franklin, and Kissinger delivered a stunning one-hour talk in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. I wasn't alone in feeling Jobs' spirit; hundreds in the nearly standing room only auditorium at Pratt Library... were mesmerized with the up close and personal stories about the "genius" and somewhat bullying nature of a man who basically lived life on his own terms.
After some 40 interviews with Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, not surprisingly, didn't need notes. The President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, charmed the crowd energetically with stories about the good, bad, and sometimes the ugly sides of an extraordinary human being. He gave us inside information, for instance, when he revealed that when Microsoft's Bill Gates whent to visit Jobs at his home in 2011, Steve Jobs told him that Gates was only coming because he had heard that "I was dying." By the end of Isaacson's presentation, however, one had to wonder whether Steve Jobs was seen as complicated because he lived life fiercely with purpose and passion. And, I might add, with a great deal of self-awareness, a trait typically rare among most of us..It had taken me to get to page 134, before I could even begin to like Steve Jobs. He sounded like a bully, someone who suffered from manic depression or a bipolar disorder, and a person so focused on his way and ideas that he was sometimes called "narcistic, dishonest, irresponsible, and unethical." Having never been a fan of Apple products or Steve Jobs, my warm-up to him was not surprising. But by page 570, I got it: my opinions really didn't matter. Whether exploring his leadership style, his personality, or his results... the truth is Steve Jobs was consistently different BECAUSE he had a mind so intimate with change that he couldn't lead a mediocre life. In the 21st century Steve Jobs is the new kind of renaissance man - steeped in art and technology, rather than art and science.
Who else but a college dropout, living life so fully - always tweaking and re-imagining things - could come up with the ultimate multitasking tool for an overly stressed society - the iPad. While the Amazon Kindle e-reader (2007) was designed to allow books and magazines to be downloaded, Steve Jobs once again got it right. He realized some people might want to do more than just read books on an electronic tablet. In 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the perfect distraction for those who might get tired or bored with just reading books - an iPad with movies, games, music, and Internet surfing.
AND ONE MORE THING...
Walter Isaacson, the former chairman of CNN and author of biographies about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger revealed, perhaps, for the first time that Steve Jobs had actually seen a small portion of the book before he died. In an attempt to capture the legacy of Steve Jobs, Isaacson decided to let Jobs have the final word by piecing together his thoughts on the subject shared during their interviews. Since Isaacson put the thoughts in a long, nearly three-page section, he decided it made sense to at least let Jobs read that section. And although nothing was changed, that section of the book is important because it shows that Steve Jobs was not so ego driven over the years that he didn't get that he had help with his insane greatness.
"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" (page 570).
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011) is a thoroughly researched and well-written story about a man of whom much has been written. So clear and compelling is Isaacson's work, that I'm doing the unthinkable - reading the book again, all 630 pages.
Jobs' magical thinking also worked on Isaacson: "I really did believe he would be around a year later to read the book as promised." But the highest complement for the biographer is that he accomplished what Steve Jobs asked him to do in the authorized work - write a book that would help his children understand him better and explain why he wasn't always present when he was present. Isaacson did that and more. He's produced a cross-disciplinary classic case study of an ordinary human being who did some extremely extraordinary things in his life time. It's a must read and a credit to the author that his work captures the humaness of a man who has made the world a better place... by following his own truths. The Steven Jobs family should be proud of their loved one's contributions to "the species."
