What I learned after reading “Steve Jobs”, a biography by Walter Isaacson
It took me around 5 months to complete this book, and completely changed the way I see the world around me, what an incredible book.
Here is how I read a book
I just start by creating a page in notion, and write things down that I can relate with, something new or something that might come handy in future.
I quote the exact paragraph/phrase and put a page number at the end, so that I can revisit them in future, and it will feel like skimming the whole book.
I also put a page number at the end of each paragraph, so in future, if I need more context, I can just open the book and read that particular page.
Now, I am sharing what I quoted from this book. Enjoy
“I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth”, said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself”, Greg Calhoun. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused” -Page 5
It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see” — Page 6
“It was a very big moment that’s burned into my mind. When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that. I will never forget that moment” This discovery, he later told friends, along with the fact that he was adopted, made him feel apart — detached and separate — from both family and the world.” -Page 11
“Look, it’s not his fault,” Paul Jobs told the teachers, his son recalled. “If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault.” His parents never punished him for his transgressions at school. — Page 12
“After school one day, she gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this’ And I thought, ‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these giant lollipops that seemed as big as the world. And she said, ‘When you are done with it, if you get it mostly right, I will give you this and five dollars’ And I handed it back within two days” Afer a few months, he no longer required the bribes. “ I just wanted to learn and to please her.” “I learned more from her than any other teacher, and if it hadn’t been for her I’m sure I would have gone to jail.” -Page 13
“I think different religions are different doors to the same house, sometimes I think the house exists and sometimes I think it doesn’t. It’s the great mystery” -Page 15
“It made you realize you could build and understand anything. Once you built a couple of radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say, ‘I can built that as well,’ even if you don’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and the Heathkits made me believe I could build anything.” -Page 16
“I came of age at a magical time,: he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could” -page 41
A great Engineer is remembered only if he teamed with a great marketer. -page 64
He emphasized that you should never start a company with goal to get rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last. -page 78
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “we will truly understand their needs better than any other company”. The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. People DO judge book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc. if we present them in a slipshod manner, the will be preceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.” -page 78
“We are inventing the future,” Job told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. “Think about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here and make a dent in the universe” -page 94
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 Rools-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 am not going to let this money ruin my life. page 105
On a visit to a Standford class, he took off his Wilkes Bashford blazer and his shoes, perched on top of a table, and crossed his legs into a lotus position. The students asked questions, such as when Apple’s stock price would rise, which Jobs brushed off. Instead, he spoke of his passion for future products, such as someday making a computer as small as a book. When the business questions tapered off, Jobs turned the tables on the well-groomed students. “How many of you are virgins?” he asked. There were nervous giggles. “How many of you have taken LSD?” More nervous laughter and only one or two hands went up. Later Jobs would complain about the new generation of kids, who seemed to him more materialistic and careerist than his own. -page 107
You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible. -page 119
“The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world”. If the reality did not comport with his will he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter, and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. -page 119
“Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture” -page 123
“The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greate” -page 123
“Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful” -page 123
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team togather for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work” he said. So he got 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 possinle. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. The he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this, he got us seeing work as art” said Atkinson. -page 134
“Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers,” explained ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber, “It would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song”. In later years, Job’s whole-widget approch would distinguish the iPhone, iPod , and iPad from their competitors, It resulted in awesome products. But it was not always the best strategy for dominating a market. “From the first Mac to the latest iPhone, Job’s systems have always been sealed shut to prevent consumers from meddling and modifying them,” noted Leander Kahney, author of Cult of the Mac. -page 137
“The journey is the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was a special corps with an exalted mission. Someday they would all look back on their journey together and, forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would regard it as a magical high point in their lives. -page 143
After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days.. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” -page 154
“What’s the difference between Apple and the Boys Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision” -page 155
On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs replied by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?” -page 170
“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way to look at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it” -page 178
“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in a sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.” -page 179
“The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits” -page 186
“In the first 30 years of life, you make habits. For the last 30 years of your life, habits makes you” -page 188
He went back to his office, gathered his longtime loyalists on the Macintosh staff, and started to cry. -page 202
Jobs had always indulged his obsession that the unseen parts of a product should be crafted as beautifully as its facade, just as his father had taught him when they were building a fence.
He called her the next day and asked her to dinner. She said no, that she was living with a boyfriend. A few days later he took her on a walk to nearby park and again asked her out, and this time she told her boyfriend that she wanted to go She was very honest and open. -page 263
Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she said.
“Steve believed it was out job to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like” -page 265
“Steve would fluctuate between intense focus, where she was the center of the universe, to being coldly distant and focused on work” -page 271
“He didn’t care one iota what people thought of him; he could cut people off and never care to speak to them again.” -page 316
“Okay, tell me what’s wrong with this place”, he said. There were some murmurings, but Jobs cut them off. “It’s the products” he answered. “So, what’s wrong with the products?” Again there were a few attempts at an answer, until Jobs broke in to hand down the correct answer. “The products suck!” he shouted. “There’s no sex in them anymore.” -page 317
“It was designed to celebrate not what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with computers” -page 328
“One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are” -page 328
“Very few other companies or corporate leaders — perhaps non — could have gotten away with the brilliant audacity of associfating their brand with Gandhi, Einstein, Picasso, and the Dalai Lama. Jobs was able to encourage people to define themselves as anticorporate, creative, innovative rebels simply by the computer they used. “Steve created the only lifestyle brand in tech industry”, Larry Ellison said. “There are cars people proud to have — Porsche, Ferrari, Prius — because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product” page 332
“Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through. He once told me, ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about” -page 387
“The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsfot didn’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much” -page 407
“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will” -page 408
So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. Jobs’ even went so far as to decree that there be only two huge bathrooms in the building, one for each gender, connected to the atrium. “He felt that very, very strongly,” recalled Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s general manager. “Some of us felt that was going too far. One pregnant woman said she shouldn’t be forced to walk for ten minutes just to go the bathroom, and that led to a big fight. -page 431
“Reality is unforgiving” -page 454
“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 exceptions, all pride, all fear od 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.” -page 457
“Memento Mori” In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him “Mememto Mori”: Remember you will die. but does it mean we shouldn’t be happy?
Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mast 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 mask and he would pick a design he liked. -page 486
Time Cook came down regularly and filled home in on the progress of new products. “You could see him brighten every time the talk turned to Apple” Cook said, “It was like the light turned on” He loved the company deeply, and he seemed to live for the prospect of returning. Details would energize him. When Cook described a new model of it’s iPhone, would energize him. When Cook described a new model of the iPhone, Jobs spent the next hour discussing not only what to to call it — the agreed on iPhone 3GS — but also the size and the font of the “GS”, including whether the letters should be capitalized (yes) and italicized (no). -page 487
“We’re guilty of making mistakes”, he said, “We’re doing the best we can, we’re learning as fast as we can — but we thought this rule made sense” -page 516
“If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company?” Tate asked. “Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution’? Revolutions are about freedom”
To Tate’s surprise, Jobs responded a few hours later, after midnight. “Yep,” he said, “freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedon from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. THe times they are changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.”
In his reply, Tate offered some thoughts on Flash and other topics, then returned to the censorship issue. “And you know what? I don’t want ‘freedom from porn.’ Porn is just fine! And I think my wife would agree.”
”You might care more about porn when you have kids,” replied Jobs. “It’s not about freedom, it’s about Apple trying to do the right thing for it’s users.” At the end he added a zinger: “By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize other’s work and belittle their motivations?”
Tate admitted to being impressed. “Rare is the CEO who will spar one-on-one with customers and bloggers like this,” -page 517
“At the press event that Friday, held in Apple’s auditorium, Jobs followed McKenna’s advice. He did not grovel or apologize, yet he was able to defuse the problem by showing that Apple understood it and would try to make it right. Then he changed the framework of the discussion, saying that all cell phones had some problems. Later he told me that he had sounded a bit “too annoyed” at the event, but in fact he was able to strike a tone that was unemotional and straightforward. He captured it in four short, declarative sentences: “We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy”
Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon stip Dilbertm was also incredulours, but far more admiring. He wrote a blog entry a few days later (which Jobs proudly email around) that marveled at how Job’s “high ground maneuver” was destined to be studied as a new public relations standard. “Apple’s response to the iphone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations playbook, because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook,” Adams wrote “If you want to know what genius looks like study Job’s words” by proclaiming up front that phones are not perfect, Jobs changed the context of argument with an indisputable assertion.”
If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4 to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with human hand. But as soon as the context is changed to ‘all smartphones have problems,’ the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth. — page 522
“They are busy doing whatever they do best, and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices” -page 564
“Most people have regulator between their mouth and brain, not Jobs” -page 564
Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the collegagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible -page 565
Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instictive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whoes insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could abosb information, sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead. -page 566
I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!” — page 567
I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. -page 569
If you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying. -pagr 570
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 os us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. -page 570
