He largely ignored a daughter he fathered in his 20s for the first years of her life, which seems inexplicable given that Jobs was adopted and angry at having been given up by his birth parents. He proposed marriage to Powell, who accepted, but then he ignored the proposal for months. Late in his life, after being given a diagnosis of cancer, he put off standard but difficult treatment for nine months, preferring instead to focus on kooky dietary regimens that he had relied on throughout life. (In his younger years, he convinced himself he needed to shower only once a week because he was on a diet of only fruit. People who sat near him disagreed.)
In his professional life, he was capable of seeing people in only two ways — as enlightened or as bozos. There was no in-between, and he would ruthlessly cast aside whoever he deemed a bozo. One time, Isaacson writes, Jobs decided a job candidate was too conventional and toyed with him “mercilessly,” suddenly asking the potential hire, “How old were you when you lost your virginity?” When the candidate later gave a dronelike answer to a technical question, Jobs mocked, “Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.”
Those who were deemed enlightened were granted the right to work with Jobs in his binary world where products were either “the best” or “totally [expletive],” Isaacson writes. It was in this hard-driving realm where Jobs’s brutal genius made magic, where his desire for simple-to-use and stylistically beautiful products achieved his stated goal in life: to connect technology with the liberal arts and make the journey — not the wealth — the reward.
Jobs operated within his own “reality distortion field,” as his colleagues dubbed it, where he was known to bend history, lie, cajole and erupt — often in the same sentence — to fulfill his technological fantasies. “In his presence, reality is malleable,” a colleague once said. “He can convince anyone of practically anything. . . . It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.”
When an engineer bristled at his suggestion that boot-up time on the Macintosh could be improved, Jobs asked, “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time?” A few weeks later, the engineer shaved off 28 seconds.
His underlings would sometimes defy him successfully, but it took creativity. For example, when Apple engineers sought help from a Sony engineer, they insisted the rival hide in a closet. “No problem,” the Sony worker told his Apple collaborators. “But American business practices, they are very strange. Very strange.”
And never more so than when being shaped by Jobs. At the end of the book, before declaring Jobs “the greatest executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now,” Isaacson takes the long view on his subject’s personality. “Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change,” Isaacson writes. “Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible.”
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