The Steve Jobs Bio - my impressions
When I first heard that there was going to be an authorized biography of Steve Jobs coming out this year I was a little interested but skeptical that it would be as harshly honest as the unauthorized Jobs biography I read years ago (iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business). I’ll admit that in the midst of the hysteria and nostalgia after the recent death of his Steveness, my interest was heightened. I was especially interested in seeing if someone could write an authorized biography of the man without getting ensnared in his famous “reality distortion field”.
It took me two weeks, but I finally finished the book and was surprised by some of the impressions it left me with. I thought I’d share a few of them here.
Just because you can be a jerk doesn’t mean you should be one. To anyone who knows much of the history of the technology industry and Apple it comes as no surprise that Steve was a grade-A douchebag much of the time. I felt that the book did an average job exploring this but at times it seemed to excuse it as just part of the package. While the feeling you’re left with from the author is that Steve’s personality flaws helped make him successful, I personally was left wondering how much more successful he would have been if he had just a little more tact and grace and a little less prickliness.
Never underestimate the appeal of simplicity. Steve Jobs never invented anything but was instead successful in refining what already existed. Sorry for stating the obvious here, but that is an incredible fact to focus on. Apple has become an insanely successful business based not on specs but on experience. As you may have figured from the title of this blog, I like simplicity and enjoy making things simpler. I passionately feel that those of us in the tech industry owe it to the rest of the world to go the extra mile to not make great technology but make great technology easy to use. None of this was a new concept to me from reading this book but it just allowed for a very interesting meditation on the appeal of simplicity, not just in technology. This, and the adoption of the Intel processor, is what attracted me to the Mac OS. As much as I enjoy getting lost in technology, I enjoy technology that just works even more.
Priorities are important. I don’t want to come off as judging Steve Jobs for his decisions in life, but I was somewhat horrified to learn how bad of a father he could be. Of course it is easy for me to say that from the perspective of being the father of a two year old, I know I’ll make mistakes over time with my son, but knowing how I feel toward my wife and son I couldn’t fathom not putting them first no matter how important my job was. Reading about this aspect of Steve’s life really made an impact on me. Hopefully, I have plenty of time left on this earth but I would feel like a complete failure if I died and had to rely on a book written about me to let my kids know what I was up to while they were growing up and I wasn’t around.
All in all, it was a very entertaining and informative book. It was fun to see what Steve’s side of the story was in many of the legends that have been spun about him. At times it can be a very emotional book, it’s hard to read about his family and not think of the loss they’ve suffered. I’m glad I took the time to read it, and I’m glad I got to live in the same world as Steve Jobs for almost 27 years.
