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What do I love about: Steve Jobs?
This is an absolutely interesting read into the life and achievements of Steve Jobs. His work attitude, passion and eccentricities are truly reflective in all the products he proceeds to develop and release. I personally love biographies and Walter Isaacson does a fantastic job on this piece.
What do I not love about: Steve Jobs?
Zilch
Who should read: Steve Jobs?
Do you like biographies? Are you a fan of Apple products? Are you a fan of Steve Jobs? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this book is for you.
Who should not read: Steve Jobs?
This book may be quite a long read. So readers who like short and crisp content may not like it. However, I have provided audio versions for your consumption
Notes from Steve Jobs
Chapter 1: Childhood- Abandoned and chosen
- Later in life he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. He who is abandoned is an abandoner.
- In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I am going to raise even before I do”? The pastor answered “Yes, Gods knows everything”. Jobs pulled out the Life cover and asked,” Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those children? “Steve, I know you do not understand, but yes, Gods knows about that”. Jobs announced that he did not want to have anything to do with worshiping such a God, and he never went back to church. He then spent years studying and trying to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism.
Chapter 3: The dropout- Turn on, Tune in
- Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality, acid and rock- Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus sub culture of the era.
- According to Kottke, some of jobs personality traits-including a few that lasted throughout his career- were borrowed from Friedland. “Friedland taught Steve the reality distortion field” said Kottke. “He was charismatic and a bit of a con man and could bend situation
Chapter 4: Atari and India- Zen and the art of game design
- Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are
Chapter 5: The Apple I-Turn on, boot up, Jack in…
- Wayne then got cold feet. As Jobs started planning to borrow and spend more money, he recalled the failure of his company. He didn’t want to go through that again. Jobs and Wozniak had no personal asset. Because they had structured Apple as a simple partnership rather than a corporation, the partners would be personally liable for the debts, and Wayne was afraid potential creditors would go after him. So he returned to the Santa Clara County office just eleven days later with a “statement of withdrawal” and an amendment to the partnership agreement. Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010 it would have been worth approximately $2.6 billion. Instead he was then living alone in a small home in Pahrump, Nevada, where he played penny slot machines and lived off his social security checks. He later claimed he had no regrets. “I made the best decision for me at the time. Both of them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride”.
Chapter 6: The Apple II-Dawn of a new age
- “You have not produced anything”. Jobs began to cry, which was not unusual. He had never been, and would never be, adept at containing his emotions.
- Jobs father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II
Chapter 7: Chrisann and Lisa-He who is abandoned
- There was a disturbing irony. Jobs and Brennan were both twenty-three, the same age that Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali had been when they had Jobs.
- He dismissed the notion that he was somehow following his biological father’s pattern of getting his girlfriend pregnant when was twenty-three , but he did admit that the ironic resonance gave him pause. “When I did find out that he was twenty-three when he got Joanne pregnant with me, I thought, whoa!
Chapter 8: Xerox and Lisa- Graphical User Interface
- “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”
- The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of the industry. “Picasso had a saying- ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Chapter 9: Going public-A man of wealth and fame.
- By the end of December 1980, Apple would be valued at $1.79 billion. Yes, billion. In the process it would make three hundred people millionaires.
- At age twenty-five, he was now worth $256 million
- You did the impossible, because you did not realize it was impossible
Chapter 11: The reality distortion field: Playing by his own set of rules
- Another key aspects of Jobs’s worldview was his binary way of categorizing things. People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole”. Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty”
- “If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it”
- He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something.
Chapter 12: The design- Real artist simplify
- Form follows emotions
- It is not done until it ships
- The journey is the reward
- Neglect is a form of abuse
- It is better to be a pirate that to join the army
Chapter 14: Enter Sculley- The Pepsi Challenge
- He had uncanny ability to get what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person
- Jobs confide in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. “We all have a short period of time on this earth”, he told the Sculleys as they sat around the table that morning. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well.
Chapter 16: Gates and Jobs- When orbit intersects
- This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most innovative products don’t always win. A decade later, this truism caused Jobs to let loose a rant that was somewhat arrogant and over-the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. “The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste”, he said.” I don’t mean in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.
Chapter 18: Next
- Job was able to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound. The result was a series of spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. This was the true learning experience. What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II
Chapter 25: Think different- Jobs as iCEO
- One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do, “he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products”
Chapter 30: The digital hub- From iTunes to the iPod
- The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind
- Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life, Jobs told Markoff. People who had never taken acid would never fully understand him.
Chapter 31: The iTunes store- I’m the Pied Piper
- Jobs did not organize Apple into semiautonomous divisions; he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own P&L”, said Tim Cook. “We run one P&L for the company
- Alex Haley once said that the best way to begin a speech is “Let me tell you a story”.
Chapter 40: To infinity- The cloud, the spaceships and beyond
- Tell me, what I was like when I was young. Bowers tried to give him an honest answer. “You were very impetuous and very difficult”, she replied. “But your vision was compelling. You told us, ‘The journey is the reward.’ That turned out to be true.”
- The president (Obama) is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t be done”, he recalled. “It infuriates me”
Chapter 42: Legacy- The brightest heaven of invention
- “Nature loves simplicity and unity.” So did Steve Jobs
- Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they are going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ “People do not know what they want until you show it to them. That is why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page
- Page 565 list the products launched over 3 decades
- He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. “I like to think that something survives after you die, “he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”
- He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,’ he said. “CLICK! And you’re gone”.
- Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”