Nataliya's Reviews > Steve Jobs

This. This is how you write a biography.

This is now my gold standard for how those should be done — informative and riveting and yet devoid of hero worship, making the person feel really real while telling a story.

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.”

— From Apple commercial, and one of my favorite quotes. And it describes Steve Jobs perfectly.

This is a story of a very difficult and yet insanely brilliant man. Steve Jobs was a revolutionary when it came to how we use our technology — but oh dear, was he a nightmare to deal with! A man combining charisma and vision with volatility and pettiness, laser-sharp focus and incredible drive, and yet viewing the world through the stark binary of either amazing or horrible.

He was intensely brilliant and an asshole at the same time.

Jobs changed personal computers, animation (Pixar! How didn’t I know about Jobs and Pixar???), music industry functioning, phones, tablets — hey, I listened to this book on my iPhone and write this review on my iPad. He created products that were intuitive to use and sexy and streamlined because he refused to just accept merely adequate. A master of Reality Distortion Field — crazy determination to get impossible things done by ignoring their sheer impossibility. (“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”)

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

Jobs sheer personality, brilliance and charismatic pull combined with his eccentricities, strong opinions and volatility make for a very interesting biography protagonist. But Isaacson goes way past what I’d expect of a book of this kind, elevating it way past a biography and turning it into a fascinating story of humans and technology. And no, unlike what I expected it was far from hero worship story; Isaacson does not sugarcoat Jobs’ shortfalls and unpleasant sides to his personality.

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Can we have that as a rule of life? Please?

It’s very well-researched, excellently and engagingly written. It goes beyond recounting Jobs’ life — it constructs a very interesting story about the life of a very interesting man, not shying away from bad or good. Fantastic, and I say that with no reservations.

Oh, and one more thing. Think different.

Easy 5 stars and a new yardstick by which to judge biographies.

Rest In Peace, Steve Jobs. You could have brought even more changes to this world had you been given more time, but I guess we’ll have to make do.

“Then he paused for a second and said, “Yeah, but sometimes, I think it’s just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you’re gone.” And then he paused again and said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.”

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Also posted on my blog.

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Recommended by: Dennis