Steve Jobs

While Isaacson explicitly describes Jobs as a genius, he also makes clear that being a genius came at a great cost. Jobs’s obsession with seeing his projects through to completion, according to his vision, often damaged his relationships and left many people in his inner circle hurt, wounded by what Isaacson considers an unnecessary cruelty. Isaacson also discards the notion that Jobs was simply unaware of how he was treating people, as evidenced in this passage: “He [Jobs] could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will” (565). As a person, Jobs was not a beloved figure who drew people in, citing his appreciation for the value of their contributions to his company and to his life. According to Isaacson, this was largely because of a binary way of thinking: things were either the best, or the worst—there was no gray area, no in-between.

Yet for Jobs his obsessive, untactful approach was also a necessary component of his massive success. As Isaacson writes, “Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change” (565). Jobs’s top priority was never to be loved or acclaimed as a leader who emanated kindness. Rather, his genius was in innovation, design, and business, and the uncompromising nature of his vision pushed him to approach people with his characteristic ruthlessness, especially as it related to Apple products. As much as he was a genius in business and innovation, he was “also, to use the technical term, an asshole at times” (564). Thus, the greatest cost of Jobs’s genius lies mostly in the toll that his treatment of others has taken on his legacy. While his achievements are undeniable, his place in the pantheon of great innovators cemented, he will not be remembered as someone whose empathy and generosity paved the way for his world-changing contributions. Instead, his legacy is rife with asterisks in terms of the way he dealt with others. Even some of his closest associates, such as Steve Wozniak and Andy Hertzfeld, wondered why he had to treat people so poorly to realize his vision.

Jobs lived in a reality of his own, where his ideas were the most important and relevant in the room. Isaacson describes this as “willfully defying reality, not only to others but himself” (118). Those in his inner circle called it a “reality distortion field,” where Jobs could bend the truth according to his opinions and desires. This approach to life and work was underscored by Jobs’s own view of himself in the context of both history and his contemporaries, as Isaacson writes: “He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one” (119), like Ghandi or Einstein.

This heightened view of himself motivated Jobs to pursue perfection in his work therefore because he was internally charged with living up to his self-given identity as someone special. Obsessed with control over the products at Apple, for instance, every detail mattered. Prior to the launch of the 1997 iMac, Jobs was irate just before the product launch that the computer had a CD tray instead of a slot. This relatively small aspect of the computer’s design almost caused Jobs to cancel the launch of the product altogether; he only decided to maintain the launch after he made his team promise to move to a CD slot in the next iteration of the computer. Years later, as the iPhone’s design was being finalized, he insisted that the team would need to start over, as the initial design conveyed that “the whole device felt too masculine, task-driven, efficient” (472). Prior to the “Think Different” ad campaign release, Jobs obsessed over every word, comma, and phrase, then debated whether to take the suggestion of recording the voice-over for the TV ad himself or keeping Richard Dreyfuss’s recording of the copy—he eventually opted for the Dreyfuss version.

In this constant pursuit of perfection, Jobs was motivated by the idea of establishing Apple as an enduring company, an institution that would change history by means of its innovative products. According to Isaacson, Jobs’s “quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have end-to-end control of every product that it made” (561). Perfectionism and control were inherently linked for Jobs, which was an echo of his view of reality and how his personal narrative fit into the larger picture of history. He needed to control his products because relinquishing control meant jeopardizing perfection. Over the course of three decades, after launching the Apple II, the Macintosh, Toy Story and Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone, and “Apple itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation” (566), Jobs’s focus on perfection had undeniably paid off.