Review: Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When you really like a book this good you wish you had read it earlier.
Steve jobs was a genius, innovator, a creator with an honestly earned reputation of being an asshole.
For years now he has earned a god like reputation among entrepreneurs or should I say hip engineering grads. Growing up in 60s meant drugs and music was part of the hip culture that he partake in for a while. Soon after that began his search for meaning and spirituality in early college years, his trip to India for that same pursuit and finally dropping out of college as well. Luck, destiny or will-whatever it was led him to finally start Apple and the rest is history.
His obsession for delivering what people didn't know they wanted(once asked whether he will do a market study he replied with a Ford's response to the same question, ' If I had asked people what they wanted they would have asked for faster horses.") distinguished his company from other contemporary companies and competitors.
His power to get the best out of people by pushing them to extremes is also well documented in the book. His colleagues refered to it as his reality distortion field that means people agreed to do things that they deemed impossible when they talked to him, and the field seems to work on Jobs himself when he wanted to shut off from something he didn't want to deal with. Whether it was his troubled relationship with his abandoned girlfriend and her daughter Lisa, or whether it was dealing with cancer later in his life, he had inhuman power of will to ignore things he didn't want to confront.
I now understand why people worship him. It is because he was unlike most people. 'He wasn't smart. He was a genius.' concludes the author.
I am impressed by how the author manages to narrate a complex and layered story without losing any details.
This is my 2nd Walter Isaacson book and I have already added his other works to my virtual library. Really enjoyed reading this book.

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