AFTERPAD

Understanding Steve Jobs

As those who follow the Apple news sites likely know, a new biography of Steve Jobs was just released. Titled “Becoming Steve Jobs”, it focuses on exactly what turned the brash, immature character from Apple’s early years into the creative genius responsible for saving Apple from bankruptcy and turning it into the most successful company in the world.

I won’t get too much into writing a book review here. Suffice it to say the book is excellent. Anyone with an interest in Steve Jobs should get it, regardless of whether or not they’ve read Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography, “Steve Jobs”. In fact, I’d argue that this book is almost essential for those who have read the Isaacson biography. Regardless of how well Isaacson wrote his book, regardless of the significant promotion accompanying it’s release, regardless even of the fact that Steve Jobs himself handpicked Isaacson to write the bio, there’s an unavoidable problem with Isaacson’s book: it utterly fails in it’s goal of capturing who Steve was.

Misunderstanding Steve Jobs

Much has been made of the details Isaacson got wrong. While these details are many, I don’t find them particularly important. Steve sure didn’t. He hand-selected Isaacson, despite Isaacson’s lack of knowledge about the technology industry, precisely because Steve didn’t want his biography to be a history of Apple. As much as us technology nerds might have wanted such a book, I believe Steve had another goal entirely: he wanted the world to know him, and understand his story. He picked Isaacson for that purpose, and Isaacson failed to live up to the task.

There is a classic episode of Star Trek that, called The Inner Light. In it, The Enterprise discovers an alien probe escaping from the remains of planet orbiting a sun that went supernova. Upon scanning the probe, Captain Picard is knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, he finds himself in the past, inhabiting the body of a citizen on the that planet.
He spends several years trying to escape, contact his crew, get back to his life. But as the years pass, he decides to embrace the life he’s found himself in. We see this man live this life over a period of several decades. He establishes himself as a prominant member of society, he falls in love, he has children. He lives his life, and is loved by those around him. As he ages into an old man, we see the planet’s looming destruction coming; the sun is expanding, there is very little time left.
The inhabitants of this world, seeing that they have no escape, select the man in their society who embodies the most good about them – the old man who Picard has become – and transcribe his life story into a sort of interactive virtual reality, to be experienced by whoever finds it, then they send that story away from their planet in a probe, as a last memento before the death of their society.

The episode ends with Picard awaking on The Enterprise, young again. The entire life he experienced only occupied a few seconds – the result of his discovering that very probe. The inhabitants of a dying planet knew there was no escape, but the best they could hope for was to be remembered, through having someone else experience their story.

I think it likely Steve Jobs never saw this episode. But I think it equally likely that the message – that the most powerful, true way to understand someone is to experience their life, to have their story told, with the small details in a life being of greater importance than the major events – was exactly why Steve hired Isaacson to write his biography. Because Isaacson is a great storyteller. Isaacson creates a character of Steve, he makes us experience major events in this character’s life, to feel what this character is feeling.

It’s also why Isaacson’s book is such a failure. Because the character he creates, the character who’s life we experience, seems to bare little resemblance to the actual Steve Jobs. Many of his family, friends, and cowokers have voiced this sentiment, but none better than Tim Cook, who said it “did a tremendous disservice” because “It didn’t capture the person.” He added: “the person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time.”

That’s a big deal. I can forgive technical inaccuracies in Isaacson’s book – he wasn’t a technologist, and Steve knew it that before he hired him. I can forgive the lack of follow-up questions to a multitude of conflicting interviews – perhaps there was a time crunch to get the book out around Steve’s death, and these things would be best added to a second edition. But Isaacson failed at his one true mission, and I can’t forgive that. He set out to make the world understand Steve, and instead made us understand a completely different character named Steve Jobs; one that seems mostly to be Isaacson’s own creation.

Setting The Record Straight

That’s where this new book comes in. Authors Brent Shlender and Rick Tetzeli have a wholly different goal than Isaacson. This book was written not to make us live Steve’s life, but rather to understand exactly what made him mature into the Steve Jobs that saved Apple.

They make their point well. They tell us Steve and Apple’s early history, but they focus much more on the facts of the situation, rather than getting mired in what Steve was feeling, and turning it into a bunch of he-said-she-said stories. They try to make us understand Steve through his actions, without presuming to tell us through his eyes, incorrectly.

But unlike Isaacson, their biggest strength is in their focus. The bulk of the book is spend talking us through the period between Steve’s ouster from Apple to his return. This is the period in Steve’s life when the changes that made him a great leader had to have occurred. The authors find those changes, talk us through each of them in turn, and make a pretty strong case for the impact they had on Steve.

By the time Steve comes back to Apple, we understand what happened. We understand why THIS Steve, the visionary leader, is separate from the caricature Isaacson portrays. We know how he became Steve Jobs.

This book isn’t perfect. Shlender and Tetzeli aren’t writers of the same caliber as Isaacson. They write dryly, with the voices of one who cover technology for a living, rather than the voice of one who covers people. Where Isaacson is a storyteller, Shlender and Tetzeli are story relayers.

In the interest of presenting facts rather than emotion, Shlender and Tetzeli compress into a few sentences stories that Isaacson invested significant time into – stories about how Jobs met his wife, about specific interpersonal conflicts, about family matters. Becoming Steve Jobs tells us the facts, but doesn’t dwell in the story of it all. It doesn’t try to put us in a specific place in time, or help us understand a situation through empathizing with any of the parties involved.

And yet still, Shlender and Tetzeli have written the definitive book on Steve Jobs. Because they wrote the truth. It might be on the dry side, it might gloss over a few important events, but it doesn’t commit the one cardinal sin Isaacson does. It represents it’s subject fairly.

There is a very real chance that Becoming Steve Jobs is the best picture we will ever have of the man behind the magic. For that reason alone, I think it’s required reading for Apple fans, and technology fans in general.