Notes on Becoming Steve Jobs

I just finished reading Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender. It is a great read and focuses on Steve Jobs’ development as a leader and entrepreneur. I learned a lot about him that I didn’t know and it also gave me a deeper appreciation for what he and Apple accomplished during his second stint with the company.

Here are some of my key takeaways from the book:

• Steve was not as much of a dick as everyone thinks he was. He cared about Apple, his Family, and Pixar. There is a beautiful simplicity in how he invested his time and worked on things he cared about. He didn’t care about sports or having a social life. He didn’t care to waste his time and he didn’t bother sugarcoating anything. He certainly made enemies early in his career, but by his return to Apple, he had developed a lot as a leader as you can see from all the people who loved working for him. Steve wasn’t concerned with making friends, he was concerned with building a great and valuable product, and he was extremely successful at that.
• There is a popular narrative that Steve was an unhappy perfectionist. He was certainly very motivated to create great products and was never satisfied, but if you look at what people closest to him in his later years say he was very focused and driven but also very fulfilled. He did aim for perfect, but he didn’t let that stop him from releasing his work, especially during the resurgence of Apple. They shipped products that could have continued to be marginally improved too. He was very demanding and had high standards, but he knew what was good enough to make public. Most true perfectionists never get their work out.
• Reading the book makes me value (and notice) even more the beauty and simplicity of Apple products. When you look at the world around us, Apple is the driving force of most technological beauty in the world. Whether it is smartphones, operating systems, retail stores, or product presentations, most companies are just copying Apple. The famous 1984 commercial pits the creative Apple against the big brother of IBM and the rest of the PC industry. Apple made products for the individual and they won.
• As I read the story of the resurrection of Apple, it kept reminding me how a small group of people can be so important to a large company. It is reasonable to think that if Apple didn’t bring Steve back, it wouldn’t exist today. There were all sorts of smart people there, but most did not have the power to create on the same scale. People there think, but they didn’t have the power to turn novel ideas into products that sell.
  • Steve Jobs was great at marketing, understanding design, and telling stories about products. Those skills allowed him to bring Apple products to reality. He couldn’t do it without others to make things work, but they couldn’t do it without him.
  • His skill set was also the opposite of most people in the tech industry. There were a lot of hardware geeks who were focused on speed and power. There were very few who understood the subjective value that design and marketing create (the life lessons from an ad man lessons). Steve did and was able to succeed brilliantly because no one else in the industry did.
• My favorite part of the book is the section detailing the resurgence of Apple leading up to his commencement speech at Stanford. Steve talks about how all the projects and things that they had worked on in the past ended up working out so well at Apple. Along the way, it didn’t seem like the dots were connected, but looking back and building from project to project they led from one to the next. They didn’t start with a vision of the Ipad. They thought up the iPod, and that opened them up to make the iPhone, and that opened them up to make the iPad.
• Steve was smart, but he didn’t succeed because of innate qualities. He became successful because of what he learned. He made a lot of very big mistakes in the first 15 years of his career. They had a big hit with the Apple two and the Mac, but other than that it was a lot of losing money and failure. If he had never come back, it is very likely that I wouldn’t even know who Steve Jobs is. Life is a long journey. So long as you never stop learning and never stop growing, you will be surprised where you end up.
• There is such a massive ripple effect in the work they did at Apple into the world today. Now if you look around an airport or a coworking space, you see the majority of people using apple phones and laptops. Sure there would be alternatives if Apple didn’t exist, but it would never be as good or the same. iMovie, Garageband, and HQ cameras on iPhones have allowed YouTubers to launch careers, kids to turn into musicians, protestors to take down governments, bloggers and internet entrepreneurs to create businesses.

Overall I really enjoyed the book. It is a great counterbalance to the dominant narrative about Steve Jobs. The no-frills look at his career and the major lessons along the way are also very fun to read if stories of great entrepreneurial triumph motivate you.

Earlier in the book, I wrote a separate post about the qualities that made Steve unique. If you’re interested, you can check it out here: https://ryanaferguson.com/2018/04/traits-of-a-visionary/