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‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Go to the web site to view the video.

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film,  Toy Story , and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called  The Whole Earth Catalog , which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of  The Whole Earth Catalog , and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

• Walter Isaacson

Reprint: R1204F

The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO’s death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs’s personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished. He built the world’s most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing.

In this essay Isaacson describes the 14 imperatives behind Jobs’s approach: focus; simplify; take responsibility end to end; when behind, leapfrog; put products before profits; don’t be a slave to focus groups; bend reality; impute; push for perfection; know both the big picture and the details; tolerate only “A” players; engage face-to-face; combine the humanities with the sciences; and “stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Six months after Jobs’s death, the author of his best-selling biography identifies the practices that every CEO can try to emulate.

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

• WI Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, is the author of Steve Jobs and of biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

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Steve Jobs Commencement Speech Analysis

Looking for Steve Jobs commencement speech analysis? Want to understand how Jobs uses ethos, logos, pathos, and figurative language? Take a look at Steve Jobs Stanford speech analysis below.

Introduction

• Speech Analysis
• Rhetorical Appeals Used

Is it necessary to follow passions or reasons while choosing a career? What effects can losses and failures have on a person’s life? In spite of the complex character and deep ethical, philosophical, and psychological meanings hidden in these questions, they are answered completely in Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005.

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, Inc., is known as one of the world-famous and successful entrepreneurs whose unique approaches to business and marketing provoked the great public’s interest. That is why Jobs’ speech on the importance of finding an interesting and loved job drew the attention and gained the recognition of the graduates during the Commencement Day at Stanford University in 2005.

Steve Jobs Stanford Speech Analysis

The goal of Steve Jobs’ speech is to persuade the graduates to find jobs that they can truly love because of their passion for definite activities. Thus, Jobs is successful in achieving his goal because of his exclusive approach to structuring the speech and to blending the rhetoric appeals in order to discuss well-known concepts and ideas of love, loss, and death in a unique form; that is why it is appropriate to examine Jobs’ manipulation of methods of persuasion in detail.

In his speech, Jobs demonstrates the virtuous use of rhetoric appeals in the development and presentation of one of the most persuasive commencement speeches in order to draw the student’s attention to the significant questions which can contribute to changing a person’s life.

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech: Rhetorical Appeals

The strategies used in developing the structure of the speech and the rhetorical strategies are closely connected. Jobs’ speech can be divided into five parts which are the introductory part to evoke the graduates’ interest regarding the topic discussed, the three life anecdotes, and the concluding part, which restates and supports the author’s arguments presented in the main part of the speech.

It is important to note that each of the three stories told by Jobs is also developed according to the definite structure pattern where the first sentences of the stories can be referred to the pathos, the personal experience can be discussed with references to the ethos, and the final parts of the stories are organized as the logical conclusions, using the logos.

The first reference to ethos is observed in the introductory part when Jobs states, “I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation” (Jobs).

The uniqueness of Jobs’ approach is in the use of the reverse variant of the ethos as the rhetorical appeal because Jobs has no credibility to discuss the importance of university education, but he has the credibility to discuss the points necessary for professional success because of stating his position as the co-founder of Apple, Inc., NeXT, and Pixar.

The next three stories presented in the speech are used to develop Jobs’ argument about the necessity of doing what a person loves and the importance of finding these things and activities. This argument is developed with references to the concluding or logical parts of the author’s stories which are also highly emotional in their character. Steve Jobs uses pathos in the first sentences while telling his stories.

Thus, the discussion of the details of the child adoption in the first story, the reflection on the happiness of building the first company, and the mentioning of the main question in life, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”, contribute to the audience’s emotional reaction because of describing the author’s own feelings and emotions (Jobs).

The credibility of Jobs’ considerations depends on the presentation of his own personal and life background and experiences to support his ideas. The use of pathos in the speech is observed when the author concludes with the results of his experience: “If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do” (Jobs).

Discussing the near death experience, the author uses the sentence “About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer,” which combines the ethos and pathos strategies (Jobs). Thus, Jobs can use more than one rhetorical appeal in a sentence.

Nevertheless, Jobs’ goal is to persuade the graduates to act and find the things that they love to do, and the focus on logos is observed in the stories’ concluding sentences when Jobs provides the logical argument: “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work” (Jobs). These concluding remarks are based on the logical rethinking of the evidence and facts presented as examples from the author’s experience.

The repetition of such phrases as “Don’t settle” and the final phrase, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” contributes to drawing the audience’s interest in the presented facts and ideas (Jobs). The effectiveness of using rhetorical appeals depends on the author’s style and his use of repetitive structures and imperative sentences, which sound persuasive.

In his speech, Steve Jobs achieves the main goals of the speech by focusing on ethos, logos, and pathos and by using the author’s unique style. Jobs presents his developed vision of his career and passions in life with references to the ideas of love and death and supports considerations with autobiographical facts.

Works Cited

Jobs, Steve. ‘You’ve Got to Find What You Love,’ Jobs Says: Text of the Address . 2005. Web.

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The Tweaker

By Malcolm Gladwell

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”

It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”

Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M. , that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:

Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC , after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.” The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, “Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”

Even within Apple, Jobs was known for taking credit for others’ ideas. Jonathan Ive, the designer behind the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, tells Isaacson, “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one.’ And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea.”

Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”

“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.” “I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.” Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated. When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”

I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge. He looked at the title bars—the headers that run across the top of windows and documents—that his team of software developers had designed for the original Macintosh and decided he didn’t like them. He forced the developers to do another version, and then another, about twenty iterations in all, insisting on one tiny tweak after another, and when the developers protested that they had better things to do he shouted, “Can you imagine looking at that every day? It’s not just a little thing. It’s something we have to do right.”

The famous Apple “Think Different” campaign came from Jobs’s advertising team at TBWAChiatDay. But it was Jobs who agonized over the slogan until it was right:

They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same , it’s think different . Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

The point of Meisenzahl and Mokyr’s argument is that this sort of tweaking is essential to progress. James Watt invented the modern steam engine, doubling the efficiency of the engines that had come before. But when the tweakers took over the efficiency of the steam engine swiftly quadrupled . Samuel Crompton was responsible for what Meisenzahl and Mokyr call “arguably the most productive invention” of the industrial revolution. But the key moment, in the history of the mule, came a few years later, when there was a strike of cotton workers. The mill owners were looking for a way to replace the workers with unskilled labor, and needed an automatic mule, which did not need to be controlled by the spinner. Who solved the problem? Not Crompton, an unambitious man who regretted only that public interest would not leave him to his seclusion, so that he might “earn undisturbed the fruits of his ingenuity and perseverance.” It was the tweaker’s tweaker, Richard Roberts, who saved the day, producing a prototype, in 1825, and then an even better solution in 1830. Before long, the number of spindles on a typical mule jumped from four hundred to a thousand. The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.

Jobs’s friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, had a private jet, and he designed its interior with a great deal of care. One day, Jobs decided that he wanted a private jet, too. He studied what Ellison had done. Then he set about to reproduce his friend’s design in its entirety—the same jet, the same reconfiguration, the same doors between the cabins. Actually, not in its entirety . Ellison’s jet “had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs insisted that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished stainless steel of the buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones.” Having hired Ellison’s designer, “pretty soon he was driving her crazy.” Of course he was. The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection. “I look at his airplane and mine,” Ellison says, “and everything he changed was better.”

The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone. He decided to sue. As he tells Isaacson:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”

Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them. But he did not like it when the same thing was done to him. In his mind, what he did was special. Jobs persuaded the head of Pepsi-Cola, John Sculley, to join Apple as C.E.O., in 1983, by asking him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” When Jobs approached Isaacson to write his biography, Isaacson first thought (“half jokingly”) that Jobs had noticed that his two previous books were on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and that he “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” The architecture of Apple software was always closed. Jobs did not want the iPhone and the iPod and the iPad to be opened up and fiddled with, because in his eyes they were perfect. The greatest tweaker of his generation did not care to be tweaked.

Perhaps this is why Bill Gates—of all Jobs’s contemporaries—gave him fits. Gates resisted the romance of perfectionism. Time and again, Isaacson repeatedly asks Jobs about Gates and Jobs cannot resist the gratuitous dig. “Bill is basically unimaginative,” Jobs tells Isaacson, “and has never invented anything, which I think is why he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

After close to six hundred pages, the reader will recognize this as vintage Jobs: equal parts insightful, vicious, and delusional. It’s true that Gates is now more interested in trying to eradicate malaria than in overseeing the next iteration of Word. But this is not evidence of a lack of imagination. Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.

As his life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. “Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,” Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores. “There would not be a straight piece of glass in the building,” Isaacson writes. “All would be curved and seamlessly joined. . . . The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome.” The architects wanted the windows to open. Jobs said no. He “had never liked the idea of people being able to open things. ‘That would just allow people to screw things up.’ ” ♦

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By Jill Lepore

By Malcolm Ross

By Andrew O’Hagan

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

• Author: Ben Austen. Ben Austen Magazine
• Date of Publication: 07.23.12. 07.23.12
• Time of Publication: 6:30 am. 6:30 am

Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997 , he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the current pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs , the recently recrowned chief executive had a simple response: Break the contract. When an Apple manager warned him that this decision would probably mean a lawsuit, Jobs responded, “Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.”

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The shipper did sue. The manager quit Apple. (Jobs “would have fired me anyway,” he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a significant amount of money to resolve. But meanwhile, Apple hired a new shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO.

What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? After all, we turn to the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want. Jobs routinely told subordinates that they were assholes, that they never did anything right. According to Isaacson, even Jonathan Ive , Apple’s incomparable design chief, came in for rough treatment on occasion. Once, after checking into a five-star London hotel handpicked for him by Ive, Jobs called it “a piece of shit” and stormed out. “The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him,” Ive explained to the biographer. Jobs’ flouting of those rules extended outside the office, to a family that rarely got to spend much time with him as well as to strangers (police officers, retail workers), who experienced the CEO’s verbal wrath whenever they displeased him.

Jobs has been dead for nearly a year , but the biography about him is still a best seller. Indeed, his life story has emerged as an odd sort of holy scripture for entrepreneurs—a gospel and an antigospel at the same time. To some, Jobs’ life has revealed the importance of sticking firmly to one’s vision and goals, no matter the psychic toll on employees or business associates. To others, Jobs serves as a cautionary tale, a man who changed the world but at the price of alienating almost everyone around him. The divergence in these reactions is a testament to the two deep and often contradictory hungers that drive so many of us today: We want to succeed in the world of work, but we also want satisfaction in the realm of home and family. For those who, like Jobs, have pledged to “put a dent in the universe,” his thorny life story has forced a reckoning. Is it really worth being like Steve?

In one camp are what you might call the acolytes. They’re businesspeople who have taken the life of Steve Jobs as license to become more aggressive as visionaries, as competitors, and above all as bosses. They’re giving themselves over to the thrill of being a general—and, at times, a dictator. Work was already the center of their lives, but Jobs’ story has made them resolve to double down on that choice.

The gospel of Steve Jobs has spread far from Silicon Valley, inspiring people in every field of business.

Steve Davis, CEO of TwoFour , a software company that caters to financial institutions, was eager to talk about Jobs’ influence on his own life and career. But first he had to find a free half hour. When he finally did steal a few moments to speak, he explained that he had consciously set aside certain aspects of his family life, since he believes that startups fail when those involved aren’t committed to being available 24 hours a day. Luckily, Davis told me, he was blessed with a wife who picked up the slack.

Davis detailed these choices matter-of-factly, but his voice rose with fervor when he described the intensity and uncertainty of entrepreneurship. He loved every minute of it. He didn’t operate with a corporate safety net. His lawyer was calling him at that very moment with a contract question, and Davis needed to pick a direction and just go with it. What should he decide? He admitted he didn’t know. The thrill came from the possibility that he might be wrong. “Guys who start companies are different from other people,” he said. “We’re willing to fail. Look at Jobs. He got knocked down, and he kept going. He’s totally unconventional, driving on his particular path, and either you join him or get out of the way.”

Join or get out of the way—it’s a phrase that sums up what Jobs’ life has taught his admirers today. Andrew Hargadon, a professor at UC Davis and author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate, points out that Jobs’ brashness has helped inspire a larger reaction to several decades of conventional wisdom about the importance of worker empowerment and consensus decision- making. “Jobs is showing us the value in the old-school, autocratic way. We’ve gone so far toward the other extreme, toward a bovine sociology in which happy cows are supposed to produce more milk.” That is, it took a hippie-geek like Jobs to give other bosses permission to be aggressive and domineering again.

This isn’t aggression for its own sake but for the good of a company. Tristan O’Tierney, a Mac and iPhone software developer, helped Twitter creator Jack Dorsey found the credit-card-swiping startup Square three years ago. O’Tierney says that he now sees the value in bluntly telling people their work is crap. “You don’t make better products by saying everything is great,” he explains. “You make them better by forcing people to do work they didn’t know they had in them.” Aaron Levie , a self-described Jobs “wantrepreneur,” started Box, which allows cloud-based file-sharing, in his USC dorm room in 2005. To new hires, he quotes Jobs—”Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected”—to make clear to them that Box is just such an environment. “My lesson from Jobs,” Levie says, “is that I can push my employees further than they thought possible, and I won’t rush any product out the door without it being perfect.” He adds: “That approach comes with collateral damage on the people side.”

Are You an Acolyte or a Rejector?

Steve Jobs had a brash personality that lends itself to very different interpretations, depending on who you are. Based on these anecdotes from Walter Isaacson’s biography, which camp do you fall into? — B.A.

In 1975, Atari paid Jobs and Steve Wozniak to create the iconic game Breakout. Woz pulled four all-nighters to get it done—but Jobs pocketed the whole bonus that Atari paid for the game’s efficient design.

You can push colleagues to extraordinary lengths.

Don’t screw over your friends.

In 1981, Jobs refused to give founding stock to Apple employee number 12, Dan Kottke. A fellow employee intervened, offering to match whatever options Jobs was willing to spare for Kottke. “OK,” Jobs replied, “I will give him zero.”

Good leadership is unsentimental.

To foster loyalty in employees, you need to be loyal to them.

In 1994, Jobs announced he was firing a quarter of the Lisa computer team, telling them, “You guys failed … Too many people here are B or C players.”

Tolerate only A players.

Scared employees don’t take risks.

In 2005, Jobs ordered a smoothie at Whole Foods, but when the aging barista didn’t make it to his taste, he railed about her incompetence.

Force the whole world to bend to your vision.

Understand the limits of your power.

It’s true that Apple employees rarely quit when Jobs called them shitheads, or even when he took credit for their ideas. An early manager on the Mac team told Isaacson about the abuses Jobs heaped on employees. But she said, “I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.” These sorts of testimonials are the proof, for many entrepreneurs and executives, that strong leadership and impressive results will lead employees to tolerate, even to embrace, unpleasant work conditions. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates , the world’s most profitable hedge fund, has been called the “Steve Jobs of investing,” in part because his firm practices a form of radical forthrightness. All Bridgewater employees are expected to clash with one another, to speak without filters or concerns about sensitivities. Dalio says he shares Jobs’ belief in the benefits of a tough, brutally candid office environment, though he requires his employees to dish it out to him just as much as they take it. He likens the mode of dialog he practices—not just at Bridgewater but in all his personal relationships—to twisting one’s limbs into a difficult yoga position or training as a Navy SEAL. “Pretty soon the pain becomes pleasure and you can’t live without it,” he says.

What acolytes want most of all is to possess the same certainty about their vision that Jobs felt about his. Neal Sales-Griffin, 25-year-old cofounder and CEO of Code Academy, a programming school in Chicago, says that after studying Jobs’ life, he doesn’t waste time anymore with the intricacies of etiquette. He openly denigrates projects that aren’t working, even if others have already invested countless hours in them. He recalls Apple’s inauspicious launch of MobileMe, the subscription service that was supposed to sync a user’s entire online existence in the cloud. From a stage in an Apple auditorium, Jobs berated the MobileMe employees for their inability to create a better product—”You should hate each other for having let each other down”—and then fired the team leader on the spot. “Jobs’ passionate approach has empowered me to be myself, with my flaws and difficulties and limitations,” Sales-Griffin says. “Look what came of it for him.”

The second camp is what you might call the rejectors. These are entrepreneurs who, on reading about Jobs since his death, have recoiled from the total picture of the man—not just his treatment of employees but the dictatorial, uncompromising way that he approached life. Isaacson’s biography is full of stories of Jobs as an unpleasant individual—the fits he would throw over the most picayune-seeming details, like the type of flowers in his hotel room or the way an aging Whole Foods barista made his smoothie. He would park in handicap spaces; he refused to get a license plate for his car. And he abandoned his oldest daughter, applying his “reality distortion field” to the question of his own paternity.

Jeff Atwood was once an acolyte. He had subsumed the whole of his identity into the company he created: Stack Exchange, a network of online Q&A sites. “You gird for war,” he says about the ethos of running a startup. “You need a spiritual fervor, an almost religious belief in the mission, to throw yourself on the shores and attack.” So it came as a surprise to Atwood—and everyone else—when he realized that he had to leave behind Stack Exchange and the startup life. And the Isaacson biography was what prompted his epiphany, turning him into a devout rejector.

He already knew all the stories about Jobs the businessman and innovator. But what he found harrowing, almost too painful to read, were the details about Jobs’ family and personal life. Atwood was brought to tears by a passage in which Jobs showed drawings for the new Apple campus to his son at home one night, and it didn’t even occur to him to call over his daughter, who had expressed interest in becoming an architect. “He paid less attention to Erin,” Isaacson writes about Jobs and his daughter, “who was quiet, introspective, and seemed not to know exactly how to handle him, especially when he was emitting wounding barbs.” Atwood, 41, recently became a father to twin daughters, and he said what Jobs did was “the opposite of parenting. Parenting is being there, man. It’s showing up.” The biography forced him to see that he, like Jobs, had allowed work to dominate his life. Atwood groaned as he recalled how Jobs would respond directly and rudely to some random customer’s email in the middle of the night: “Here’s why you’re an idiot.” Atwood would do the exact same thing. He really didn’t want to quit, but he saw that nuclear option as the only way to disrupt the cycle. “If you’re going to fail at building something,” he says, “fail at building the fucking iPad. Don’t fail at building children.”

For some of these more repulsed readers, it’s the tales of managerial cruelty that have gotten under their skin. Verinder Syal—a former executive at Quaker Oats who bought a coffee franchise, sold it, and now runs a consulting firm and teaches business-school students—expected to adore the biography. He greatly admired Jobs’ ambitions, and he regularly extolled him to students as a paragon of leadership. The book saddened him, though: Syal couldn’t understand why Jobs felt the need to be right all the time and to blame others, why he had to claim other people’s ideas as his own. Syal says he went back to his classes and admitted that he was wrong. “Jobs was like dynamite,” Syal says. “Dynamite clears paths, but it also destroys everything around it.” Syal didn’t think much of Bill Gates before, but he does now. “ Gates evolved from an asshole into a human being,” he says. “Jobs remained an ass.”

But most of the rejectors are, like Atwood, entrepreneurs who worry about their roles as fathers. A few of them single out one particular moment near the end of the book, when Jobs explains why he asked Isaacson to write it. “I wanted my kids to know me,” Jobs said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.” Brad Wardell, CEO of the software and computer-game-design company Stardock , was shaken when he realized that the same powers of reality distortion that allowed Jobs to create the iPod also led him to deny the seriousness of the pancreatic cancer that killed him. (For nine months, Jobs delayed undergoing conventional treatment.) Wardell, 41, says his formative years corresponded to the rise of Jobs, and Jobs’ influence helped him “put every ounce of energy and focus into Stardock.” That translated into 80- and 90-hour workweeks, maniacally testing every version of every piece of software, reviewing all source code, writing notes nonstop. “But I realized that, like Jobs, I could die. Jobs missed out on his kids, and I’d have missed out on mine too.” Wardell now often works from home, and he has hired people to manage aspects of the business he previously handled himself.

Many of these former fanboys are reconsidering their allegiance to Jobs in part because they are no longer boys. Now in their forties, they’re confronting the end of their young-adult selves—they have children, and their own parents have become senior citizens or died. Matt Haughey, founder of the community weblog Metafilter, addresses this point directly in a presentation called “ Lessons From a 40- Year-Old ,” which he delivered last February at the web-design conference Webstock. Haughey remarked that he was grayer, his daughter was turning 7, he had recently put down a longtime pet, and he had experienced his own near-brush with cancer (a brain tumor that turned out to be benign). Haughey heard many in his cohort—most of them devoted Jobs followers—saying, “It is time not to end up like Steve.” So rather than trying to create the next Apple, he proposed building a “lifestyle business,” a smaller-scale enterprise that rejects venture capital and funds itself, leaving its owner time for pursuits outside of work. He displayed a graph of his mid-twenties existence, with the bar representing work towering over the one for personal life. Now that he’s 40, the bar heights are reversed.

It’s worth pointing out that these male rejectors have wound up where most female entrepreneurs have been all along. Women CEOs and managers didn’t need a biography of an absent father to start thinking about balancing work and family; unlike the fortysomething dudes, they’ve been having conversations about this trade-off most of their lives. Rashmi Sinha, CEO of the presentation-sharing service SlideShare, was pregnant with twins when she devoured the Isaacson book. She read it to understand how Jobs created great products, but the possibility of gleaning any personal lessons from his life didn’t even cross her mind. Similarly, Heidi Messer, cofounder of the affiliate-marketing firm LinkShare, has told her entire marketing staff to read the biography, but without any thought that they’d construe Jobs to be her own role model as a manager. She does suggest one personal lesson from Jobs’ life: “If he could do Apple and Pixar—two multibillion-dollar companies—then I should be able to handle one business and also my family.”

The rejectors all know that quelling their Jobs-like tendencies will be a struggle. They are by nature strivers, perfectionists. They also know that their retreat from the struggle—adopting a lifestyle-centric approach to business—means they will never accomplish as much as they would have otherwise, let alone as much as Jobs did. If they used to release six products a year, now they produce only two. If previously they sent out three dozen emails during the dinner hours, then now they make do with sending just a few. Rather than planning to take their startups public, they are shooting for enough profit to sustain their employees and themselves. To create the lifestyle they want, or need, these entrepreneurs are reining in their compulsions, imposing limits on themselves.

When he’s not writing best-selling biographies, Walter Isaacson runs the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC, that covers everything from business development to education and foreign policy. At his office there, Isaacson proves to be a gracious New Orleanian, easeful and attentive—in short, nothing like Steve Jobs. He says that readers of the biography have been seeking him out to discuss their uncanny similarities to Jobs or their desires to behave more like him. Two executives visited the writer separately just hours before me. One of them was Bridgewater’s Dalio, who came specifically to confer about people he called “shapers,” those who overcame tremendous opposition to transform vision into reality. Dalio hoped that he and Isaacson could suss out a few of the traits shared by such shapers as Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Margaret Thatcher, and perhaps also Dalio himself. When I asked Isaacson about the life lessons of Jobs, he ducked behind his desk and returned with articles that had recently been forwarded to him, each one about the merits and demerits of emulating Jobs’ jerkiness.

Isaacson himself has published what he deems a corrective , writing in Harvard Business Review that readers hoping to draw meaning from Jobs’ life should fixate less on his petulance as a boss and more on his remarkable achievements at Apple and Pixar. Isaacson distilled the real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs down to 14 business proverbs, such as “Bend reality,” “Push for perfection,” and “Tolerate only A players.” “Long after their personalities are forgotten,” he remarks of Jobs, along with the pantheon of Edison, Ford, and Disney—not one a saint—”history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.”

The author admits that he now tends to defend Jobs against personal attacks, since his book has provided much of the ammunition. Isaacson sees Jobs as being hardly more blameworthy, even in his worst moments, than other powerful people. Readers he knows personally claim to be shocked that Jobs would brazenly park in handicap spaces, but Isaacson says some of them are bankers who created the derivatives that screwed clients out of their life savings and helped lead to worldwide recession. When other readers express their contempt for the way Jobs treated his family, Isaacson asks them, “Then how come you’ve been married three times and this particular daughter doesn’t fucking speak to you?” Indeed, Isaacson rejects the premise that Jobs failed with his family. He points out that Jobs ended up with a strong marriage and four loving children, all of whom were at his side during his illness. A wooden table filled much of Jobs’ kitchen, and for the last two decades of his life he came home just about every night and sat down for dinner. “Jobs could have been a better father,” Isaacson concedes. “But I look at that family, and it’s perfectly wonderful. It couldn’t be a better family.”

Yet Isaacson understands how genius worship has led to multiple interpretations. “It’s like arguing the gospels with a fundamentalist,” he says about the futility of trying to rebut what he sees as misreadings of Jobs’ life. He tells me what he’s told lots of people who have sought him out to catechize about the book—that his biographies aren’t how-to manuals for the good life. He isn’t arguing that readers not look for guidance in the story of Jobs; he knows it is the nature of biography-reading to do so. But Isaacson stresses that Jobs’ life was complex, the lessons to be found myriad.

At least since Plutarch illuminated the moral character of famous Greeks and Romans, readers have looked to biographies for guidance and inspiration. My father still recites a corny Longfellow poem he learned as a kid back in the ’50s:

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again.

Some intimate portraits are meant to debunk the iconic figure, their anecdotes served up as exposé. But usually the readers of biographies are supposed to recognize some aspect of themselves, or a wished-for better self, in the footprints of the eminent subjects. The genre is intensely individualistic, rebuffing sociology and collective history, and the reading experience winds up being no less personal.

Ironically, in Jobs’ remarkable story of self-creation we can see why the rest of us are so hungry for a role model to light our own paths. Whether it was in the early days, when he manipulated Steve Wozniak into building products for him to sell, or later in his career, when he was struggling to shape NeXT from scratch, or even after returning to Apple, when he created entirely new products, Jobs had no one to tell him how to realize his vision. He made high-stakes decisions on his own, with little to rely on besides his well-honed intuition. And on a smaller scale, isn’t that true of us all? In life, as in business, there really aren’t any concrete answers or clear guides. We can’t help but see a biography like Steve Jobs as a rare road map to the uncharted world we awake to every morning .

So what, then, is Jobs’ real legacy as a human being? “It’s his passion,” Isaacson says, after some deliberation. “We all want to lead the passionate life. We want a life of emotional connections. If that’s what you get by saying, ‘I will be more like Steve Jobs,’ then that’s not bad.”

The gospel of Steve Jobs has spread far from Silicon Valley to touch people in every field of business. My cousin Jason is a yoga entrepreneur in Asheville, North Carolina; he makes foam accessories to help people stretch more ergonomically. When he came to visit not long ago, he brought his copy of Steve Jobs along with him. “I care about all these tiny design details no one else does,” he says, nodding at the book as it sat between us on my dining room table. “I get frustrated, catching myself telling people who work for me that their ideas are shit.” Our respective children in the next room celebrated their reunion by putting on a succession of princess and monster costumes. Motioning toward them, Jason said he now accepts that traveling constantly and spending less time with family is a necessary trade-off if he, too, wants to produce a great product. “When your karma and your lila meet, you find your dharma—your one true path,” he tells me, citing a precept that might have sat well with Jobs, a devotee of Eastern religions. “It’s a beautiful concept. You discover your way to contribute to the world. That’s what Jobs found. He contributed so much to humanity with his products.”

In the end, that remains the paradox in the life of Steve Jobs. He put his uncompromising and sometimes brutal personality into the creation of products that strike us as beautiful, even uplifting. But the historical moment that he helped to create—a magical intersection of technology and commerce and culture, as our computers and computerized gadgets matured from purely functional items to expressions of ourselves—is unique to his life story. Without his unyielding approach to design, we might never have had our iPods and MacBooks and iPads. But most of us don’t need, or want, to take such an unyielding approach. We don’t operate Apple-sized corporations and redefine industries. Our employees, if we have any, will quit or undermine the company if they are repeatedly called shitheads who suck. Family members will find ways to administer payback if persistently ignored or mistreated. Jobs operated on an entirely different plane from just about anyone else. For the rest of us, trying to behave like him will make us and everyone around us miserable.

As he was writing his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, felt obligated to include a chapter on “the virtues of assholes,” as he puts it, in large part because of Jobs and his reputation even then as a highly effective bully. Sutton granted in this section that intimidation can be used strategically to gain power. But in most situations, the asshole simply does not get the best results. Psychological studies show that abusive bosses reduce productivity, stifle creativity, and cause high rates of absenteeism, company theft, and turnover—25 percent of bullied employees and 20 percent of those who witness the bullying will eventually quit because of it, according to one study.

When I asked Sutton about the divided response to Jobs’ character, he sent me an excerpt from the epilogue to the new paperback edition of his Good Boss, Bad Boss, written two months after Jobs’ death. In it he describes teaching an innovation seminar to a group of Chinese CEOs who seemed infatuated with Jobs. They began debating in high-volume Mandarin whether copying Jobs’ bad behavior would improve their ability to lead. After a half-hour break, Sutton returned to the classroom to find the CEOs still hollering at one another, many of them emphatic that Jobs succeeded because of—not in spite of—his cruel treatment of those around him.

Sutton now thinks that Jobs was too contradictory and contentious a man, too singular a figure, to offer many usable lessons. As the tale of those Chinese CEOs demonstrates, Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”

Ben Austen ( [email protected] ) wrote about YouTube stars in issue 20.01.

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Steve Jobs (2011) is an authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson about the life of the late Apple founder and tech revolutionary. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs, the book is an in-depth exploration of who Jobs was, from the story of his birth and subsequent adoption to his massive success at the helm of Apple. Jobs himself personally requested that Isaacson write his biography on a phone call in 2004. By the time the book was published seven years later, Isaacson and Jobs had formed a special bond. The book went on to become a New York Times bestseller and was later adapted into a feature film in 2015 starring Michael Fassbender with a screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin.

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Isaacson introduces the book by describing how Jobs called him in 2004, requesting that he write his biography. Jobs was born to two graduate students who gave him up for adoption. His birth parents were adamant their son be raised by college graduates who would make his education a priority. Upon learning more about Paul and Clara Jobs, Steve’s adoptive parents, they agreed to allow the couple to adopt the boy with the promise that they would fund Steve’s education. Paul Jobs was a member of the US Coast Guard during the Second World War. His wife, Clara, was the daughter of Armenian refugees who fled the region during the Turkish conflict. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1952. The narrative then shifts to Jobs’s biological parents. His biological mother, Joanne Schieble, was a devout Catholic who fell in love with Abdulfattah Jandali, a teaching assistant from Syria. As her father forbade them to marry and abortion was frowned upon in their strict Catholic community, the couple decided to give their infant son up for adoption.

Isaacson chronicles Jobs’s relationship with his business partner and co-creator of Apple, Steve Wozniak (Woz). The two met while attending the same electronics class and soon realized that their ideas and goals were similar. Before long, the two developed a lasting friendship and a working relationship that would revolutionize the technology industry for decades to come.

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Chrisann Brennan became Jobs’s first girlfriend in 1972. Around this time, Jobs began experimenting with various changes to his lifestyle, including an exploration of vegetarianism and LSD. Jobs also entered college in 1972. His adoptive parents tried to convince him to attend Stanford or Berkeley, but Jobs had his eyes set on Reed College.

Jobs attended undergraduate school for two years until, in 1974, he left Reed College and began looking for work. Eventually, he landed a job at Atari. The author illustrates the somewhat flamboyant attitude that would follow Jobs throughout his life by recounting an instance at Atari where Jobs barged in and demanded he be hired. His attitude ostracized Jobs from the Atari culture; his supervisors relegated him to the night shift because of his body odor and the fact that no one wanted to work with him. However, Jobs’s time at Atari provided the blueprint for what would become a lifelong appreciation for mingling simplicity with elegant design.

The cultural climate of the early-mid 1970s had as much influence on Jobs as did his stints at various companies. Working at Hewlett-Packard gave him access to the resources and brainpower needed to perfect his initial designs. During this time, dissension began among the Apple co-founders, specifically Wozniak, whose father was concerned that his son would not receive the same equity and esteem as Jobs.

Notable in Jobs’s life at the start of Apple’s rise in the tech industry was Steve’s refusal to embrace his own daughter Lisa, who Chrisann had given birth to in 1978. Jobs denied he was the father, and ultimately was only convinced when a DNA test proved his paternity. Eventually, he would go on to have three more children during his marriage to Laurene Powell.

Despite personal and professional setbacks, Apple Computers skyrocketed in brand recognition and usability with the launch of the first Mac in 1984. Although the company experienced an initial loss of sales due to the ubiquity and market share of IBM, Jobs’s ingenuity and creative prowess provided the springboard for a marketing campaign that drastically increased the company’s popularity.

After chronicling the meteoric success that Apple would experience through the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone , Isaacson concludes the book by reiterating Jobs’s position as one of the great innovators of the twentieth century. 

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Home — Essay Samples — Business — Steve Jobs — Three Stories Of Life: Rhetorical Analysis Of Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech

Three Stories of Life: Rhetorical Analysis of Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech

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How Steve Jobs Turned Setbacks Into Success His story serves as a reminder that disasters also make the eventual triumph sweeter.

By Richard Koch • Dec 28, 2020

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The following excerpt is from Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It: Unlocking the Nine Secrets of People Who Changed the World , out now via Entrepreneur Press. Purchase from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | IndieBound | Entrepreneur Press .

It is not enough to be resilient and get over setbacks; to be unreasonably successful, you must learn to positively thrive on them. No one knew that better than Steve Jobs.

In 1985, Jobs was brutally fired from the company he had founded. Jobs sold all his shares — 11% of Apple — bar one solitary share. This was not the action of a man planning a comeback. He was out, it seemed, forever.

Can you imagine what that must have done to the man who thought he was a genius, the man who had created the Macintosh — possibly, despite its weaknesses, the greatest product leap forward Silicon Valley had ever made — and was now frozen out of Apple? To add insult to injury, Apple shares soared almost 7% when his departure was announced.

He then immersed himself in something called NeXT. The product was a high-end workstation sold only to colleges and universities. NeXT was a caricature of Jobs' search for a spectacular product, along with all his worst indulgences and habits. He started by paying $100,000 for a logo, a perfect black cube. Because the logo was so beautiful, Jobs insisted that the computer should also be a perfect cube, which was expensive to manufacture. Jobs built a fancy futuristic factory, complete with white walls, $20,000 black leather chairs and an impossibly grand staircase which seemed to float in space. The head office had one of these too.

The product went on the market in mid-1989, some two years late. It had some great features, such as the Oxford dictionary and complete works of Shakespeare. The computer had an optical read/write disk, but no backup floppy disk. The optical disk had high capacity but was slow. Jobs had promised his academic market that it would cost between $2,000 and $3,000, but it came out at $6,500. If you wanted a printer, it was another $2,000, and an additional $2,500 for an external hard disk. NeXT expected to sell its factory capacity of 10,000 computers a month. Only 400 a month were sold.

Related: Driving the Road to Success

NeXT was a magnificent flop — Jobs at his most expansive and least commercial. Yet the venture served a function for Jobs: It distracted him from being fired from Apple, it kept him in the digital game, it preserved his self-respect as a player in the brave new world, it gave him valuable lessons in how not to create a viable business, and most of all, it eventually paved the way for his return to Apple, when it was in even worse straits than NeXT.

While NeXT limped on, Jobs' obsession with digital images and computer animation pulled him ever deeper into another massive learning experience. After leaving Apple, he had become the majority investor in Pixar, whose main product was the Pixar Image Computer. It sold for $125,000, mainly to digital animators and graphic designers (think Silicon Valley serving Hollywood). Disney was Pixar's biggest customer. Alongside the hardware, Pixar had two other products: software for the computer and a small sideline making animated movies. While running NeXT, Jobs provided Pixar with ideas and board supervision, but neither were fruitful. By 1991, Pixar was in the intensive care ward. It could neither sell enough of its very expensive kit, nor invent a new mass-market product. Jobs had sunk nearly $50 million into Pixar. Then serendipity intervened.

In 1988, John Lasseter, the creative genius behind Pixar's animated films, had made Tin Toy , a very short movie about a toy called Tinny and the boy who plays with the toy, seen from the latter's perspective. A brilliant little piece of work, Tin Toy became the first computer-generated film to win an Oscar. Lasseter and Jobs had become friends and soulmates. Jobs loved computer animation and had bankrolled Tin Toy.

In 1991, Michael Eisner, the larger-than-life workaholic boss of Disney, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of the Disney film division, who had been hugely impressed by Tin Toy , tried to lure Lasseter back to Disney. But Lasseter was loyal to Jobs and told Disney no. Then Katzenberg tried to get Pixar to make films for Disney, and to give Disney exclusive rights to the Pixar 3-D animation technology. After vigorous talks, in May 1991 a deal was agreed: Disney would fund and own the first new movie they collaborated on, together with the characters in it. And the massively successful Toy Story franchise was born. You may know that Toy Story was a massive success, loved by critics, cinema-goers and Pixar's bankers. Jobs insisted on an extravagant price for Pixar's shares, yet they almost doubled on the first day of trading. Jobs' stake, virtually worthless at the start of 1991, became worth $1.2 billion.

After Toy Story and the Pixar float in 1995, the next year saw another Jobs coup. He persuaded Apple to buy his ailing company NeXT as the price for his reinvolvement with Apple. Then in 1997, as Apple stared at the abyss of bankruptcy, the board begged Jobs to take the reins. He now understood that to fulfil his destiny, he needed Apple as much as it needed him. Jobs had become anti-fragile, a gambler who had twice been to the brink, yet came back stronger, poised for greatness.

Related: Steve Jobs and the 7 Rules of Success

There is a template for turning repeated reverses, eventually, into supreme triumph, just like Jobs did:

• Take big risks. • Do not be dismayed if they don't work out. • After a disaster, keep going, but switch gears. • Reframe the disaster. • Unless you keep your original objective, immerse yourself in something different. • Setbacks give feedback. You need reverses and are going to get them anyway. Use them to make you stronger, more robust to future failure and to gain new experiences. The disasters also make the eventual triumph sweeter. • Never give up hope. You can't know the future, but you must trust it. Remain fulfilled and coolly confident; jump when the big break beckons. • Feed an intense sense of personal drama. What you will achieve matters — not just personally, but to the world. • Expect catastrophes to be followed by great rejoicing, all the greater for what went before. A novel or movie that ends in failure is not a very good story. Reject the script — improve it, transcend it.

Thrive on setbacks. It is a way of thinking, a philosophy of life and a self-conceit essential for unreasonable success.

British Author, Speaker, Investor, and former Management Consultant and entrepreneur.

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Learning from the Life of Steve Jobs

Jobs never made a decision that was simply good enough..

Posted December 1, 2011

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone? - Steve Jobs

Like many of you, I have just read the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (2011). I'm happy to recommend it to any of you yet to take a look. It contains a wealth of compelling information not only about Jobs himself but the era in which he lived, which is to say the era in which all of us have lived and still do.

For no particularly good reason, I have not owned any Apple products, so what I knew about them was always one step removed, although many of my friends and colleagues have sung their praises to me over the years. Now I get it, and I may actually take an Apple plunge.

However, the central focus of the book is not the technology that Jobs helped bring to the world. The focus is on Jobs, and the picture conveyed is one of an incredibly complex and driven individual. The author provides plenty of biographical details that help to make psychological sense of Stephen Jobs and his signature style yet resists simplifying. The appeal of the biography is that each reader can use it to make his or her own sense of Steve Jobs.

What follows in this essay is my sense.

My initial response while reading the book was sadness and dismay that such an accomplished person seemed to be unhappy so much of the time. From my perspective as a positive psychology researcher, Jobs had it all in terms of the ingredients of a satisfied life (a sense of meaning and purpose, engagement with his work, friends and family, accomplishments galore), yet satisfaction was often elusive.

Moreover, Jobs seemed to be a thoroughly difficult guy. He was impatient with others, harsh in his judgments, and manipulative. One of the recurring ideas in the book is that Jobs had a "reality distortion field" that led him to ignore the facts and indeed encouraged others to do the same. Again from my perspective as a positive psychology researcher, these tendencies should have made his life and career dual disasters, but they did not.

What most caught my attention about Jobs as described in the book was his perfectionism , which showed up not only with respect to his products but also with respect to how he lived his mundane life. One of the truisms of positive psychology, amply supported by research, is that those who "maximize" their choices and decisions, trying to make the best ones possible, are not as happy as those who "satisfice" their choices and decisions, trying to make those that are good enough but not necessarily perfect (Schwartz, 2002).

Jobs never made a decision that was simply good enough, whether it was designing a computer case, laying out an Apple store, or ordering a meal in a restaurant. For example, Jobs did not think computers should have an internal fan because the noise would disturb the experience of the user. Creating a fan-free computer was exceedingly difficult for Apple engineers but eventually possible. For another example, Jobs insisted that the inside of a computer be as attractive as the outside, never mind that a user would never see the inside 1 . And Jobs fretted mightily about the appearance and construction of the cardboard box in which an Apple computer was shipped, despite the fact that such boxes would of course be discarded.

There are two traditions in positive psychology (Bacon, 2005). One is a warm and fuzzy tradition that stresses positive emotions and harmonious relationships; many equate this tradition with the whole of positive psychology, and it is the perspective of this tradition that led to my initial dismay upon reading the biography of Steve Jobs. But the second tradition deserves as much attention. It stresses accomplishment and achievement. It is a tradition that smacks of elitism and is harder to hug because it may not hug back. But if our concern is with the good life, we need to acknowledge, celebrate, and understand both traditions.

Some critics have argued that Steve Jobs never really invented anything. I beg to differ. He invented the 21 st century, and he did it his way. And his way became our way. If the life of Jobs does not conform to the pronouncements of psychology about the good life, then it is our theories that need to change and expand and - dare I say - become more perfect.

1. "A story is told about the medieval stone masons who carved the gargoyles that adorn the great Gothic cathedrals. Sometimes their creations were positioned high upon the cathedral, hidden behind cornices or otherwise blocked from view, invisible from any vantage point on the ground. They sculpted these gargoyles as carefully as any of the others, even knowing that once the cathedral was completed and the scaffolding was taken down, their work would remain forever unseen by human eye. It was said that they carved for the eye of God. That, written in a thousand variations, is the story of human accomplishment" (Charles Murray, 2003, Human accomplishment, p. 458).

Bacon, S. F. (2005). Positive psychology's two cultures. Review of General Psychology, 9, 181-192.

Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve Jobs. New York; Simon & Schuster.

Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why less is more. New York: HarperCollins.

Christopher Peterson was professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

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Steve Jobs – A Story of Overcoming Obstacles

The story of Steve Jobs

Learn how Steve Jobs overcame childhood trauma and other obstacles to become an innovator in the technology and animation world.

More true stories

Introduction

Steve Jobs was a business magnate and a widely successful innovator in his time. He is widely known as the man who achieved so much in his lifetime and pioneered the computer, personal device and phone industry as the CEO and co-founder of the first company to be worth over $1 trillion with Apple. But what obstacles did Steve Jobs have to overcome to get that point in his life where he became known as an icon of human progress? In this piece, we will be going over the obstacles that he faced on his path to success and how he overcame them, as well as what people and society can learn from the path he walked.

The Obstacles Steve Jobs Faced

Steve was set to struggle to succeed from his birth. He was born to a young, unwed graduate student who had decided that the best outcome for her child was to put him up for adoption. It was at this time that a couple who had offered to take him upon his birth was turned down by Steve’s biological mother due to the fact that she wanted Steve to be brought up by a family who had graduated from college, which this couple had not done. They eventually managed to adopt Steve as a result of promising that he would attend college down the line no matter what. And that he did.

However, Steve would hit the first roadblock of his adult-life at this point. He had decided to drop out of college as he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life as well as having no idea how college was going to help him figure this path out. This was the time when Steve just let whatever will be, be and trusted that life would turn out alright. He slept on the floor of friend’s rooms and he would return Coke bottles for the 5cent deposits in order to survive and buy food. It was during this time that Steve would attend drop-in classes in calligraphy, which he thought would have no bearing in his life, but he attended nonetheless out of interest. Little did he know at the time that this would be the pre-set for the customizable fonts and spacing for the iconic Macintosh computer.

It was not long after that Steve started a company in his garage with a friend, where eventually, ten years down the line, it would be worth over $2billion. However, it was during this time that he was fired by the company that he had founded. This was a shock for Steve, but he states that it was the one decision that shaped the rest of his life.

In 2004, the beginning of a series of health problems began as he was diagnosed with a supposedly incurable cancer that would leave him with an expected three-six months left to live. He was told by the doctor to “go home and get your things in order”, which Steve states is ‘doctor code’ for “prepare to die”. This event was followed by a liver transplant that he needed in 2009 and ultimately in 2011 he passed away through a respiratory arrest through a reoccurrence of his pancreatic cancer with his family around him.

How Did Steve Jobs Overcome His Obstacles?

Steve always acknowledged that at every point in his life, he never had the answers. He states that “you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward”. As previously stated, Steve realized over time that his firing from Apple was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. He felt that the heaviness of his success was replaced by the lightness of being able to begin again.

It was at this ‘reset-era’ that Steve started two new companies and met the love of his life. He began a company named NeXT and Pixar, he describes this time period as the “most creative period of his life”. Pixar would go on to become the most successful animation studio on the planet and NeXT would eventually be bought by Apple, cementing Steve’s circle of life as he returned to Apple. This turn of events highlights Steve’s belief that things would just work out no matter the circumstances if he kept his interest high and passion flowing. Alongside his return to Apple, Steve had made a beautiful family, which is the ultimate goal of life.

Steve would show his ultimate passion for success and pride in his work as despite his resignation as Apple CEO in 2011, he would continue to work for the entire six weeks leading up to the day before his death. Steve lived, breathed and experienced what it was to be a man who prided himself on his projects and work, and no matter what, put his all into everything he did in both sickness and in health.

Key Lessons for Inspiration

Steve himself had many lessons that can be learned from his life story. There are many lessons that can be stated, but here are a few to consider.

1. Always Bounce Back from Life’s Hardships

He believed that when life has decided to throw a curved ball at you, that it is vital to not let it deter you from your goal. Shown with his health problems and continuation to work, as well as his firing from Apple to only go on and create one of the most successful animation studios ever.

2. Discover What You Love to Feed Your Path to Success

Steve was also convinced that the only thing that kept him going despite his setbacks was that he loved what he did, and he felt that for everybody, it is vital to find what you love in life in order to keep bouncing back from the setbacks you will face.

3. Acknowledge Your Mortality and Realize You Have Nothing to Lose

The acknowledgment of one’s mortality and inevitable death is of utmost importance and was always something that Steve would think of when needed guidance on important life choices. He states that “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose”. Always live life in the moment and follow your heart and intuition to guide you to your life’s purpose, as they will always know the answer before you do.

4. Do Not Waste Your Life Being Concerned with Other People’s Opinions

Steve states that “your time is limited, so do not waste it living someone else’s life, don’t be trapped with dogma, which is living with the knowing of other people’s opinions”. Steve followed his own heart and head with every vital decision he made on his path to success, despite the obvious public and private judgments of others. We must not let others waste our lives for us by letting their thoughts and opinions drag us into the mud. We must live our own life for ourselves.

In conclusion, Steve Jobs was a man who shaped a large majority of the technological world we live in today. As well as this, he was a man who had to overcome many setbacks to get to the level of success he had achieved before his death. His words of wisdom are ones that everyone should consider when wanting to discover what purpose their life has in this world.

Do not miss the chance to check out other inspirational and true stories available at SuninMe.org

Steve Jobs Deathbed Speech

Apple co-founder steve jobs did not leave behind a deathbed warning about how the "non-stop pursuit of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me.", published nov. 7, 2015.

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In November 2015, a rumor began circulating on social media that when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away at age 56 in 2011, he delivered a speech or left behind a deathbed essay about the meaning of life.

One of the earliest iterations of this rumor we've found was published on gkindshivani.wordpress.com under the title "DID YOU KNOW WHAT WERE THE LAST WORDS OF STEVE JOBS?":

"I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In others' eyes, my life is an epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy. In the end, wealth is only a fact of life that I am accustomed to. At this moment, lying on the sick bed and recalling my whole life, I realize that all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in, have paled and become meaningless in the face of impending death. In the darkness, I look at the green lights from the life supporting machines and hear the humming mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of god of death drawing closer ... Now I know, when we have accumulated sufficient wealth to last our lifetime, we should pursue other matters that are unrelated to wealth ... Should be something that is more important: Perhaps relationships, perhaps art, perhaps a dream from younger days Non-stop pursuing of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me. God gave us the senses to let us feel the love in everyone’s heart, not the illusions brought about by wealth. The wealth I have won in my life I cannot bring with me. What I can bring is only the memories precipitated by love. That's the true riches which will follow you, accompany you, giving you strength and light to go on. Love can travel a thousand miles. Life has no limit. Go where you want to go. Reach the height you want to reach. It is all in your heart and in your hands. What is the most expensive bed in the world? Sick bed ... You can employ someone to drive the car for you, make money for you but you cannot have someone to bear the sickness for you. Material things lost can be found. But there is one thing that can never be found when it is lost — Life. When a person goes into the operating room, he will realize that there is one book that he has yet to finish reading — Book of Healthy Life. Whichever stage in life we are at right now, with time, we will face the day when the curtain comes down. Treasure Love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends. Treat yourself well. Cherish others."

Although Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, the above-quoted essay didn't begin circulating online until November 2015, was not published anywhere outside of unofficial social media accounts and low-traffic blogs, and has not been confirmed by anyone close to the founder of Apple.

Furthermore, after Steve Jobs passed away on 5 October 2011, his sister Mona Simpson remarked on her brother's final words while delivering his eulogy:

Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times. Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve's final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

While the above-quoted essay does not represent either Steve Jobs' final words nor remarks he made (in either oral or written form) at any time during his life, his biographer Walter Isaacson did record Jobs' expressing regret at the end of his life about how he raised his children:

"I wanted my kids to know me," Mr Isaacson recalled Mr Jobs saying, in a posthumous tribute the biographer wrote for Time magazine. "I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did." "He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That's what made him so great," he added. "Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, 'It's 10,000 times better than anything I've ever done'." It wasn't always thus. In the early stages of his career, Jobs, who was adopted, denied being the father of Lisa and insisted in court documents that he was "sterile and infertile". He acknowledged paternity when she was six, and they were later reconciled.

By Dan Evon

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.

Fact check: Commentary on wealth is falsely labeled as Steve Jobs' last words

The claim: Steve Jobs' last words were a commentary on wealth

Steve Jobs’ last words were about his admiration of his family, not a critique of wealth, as a viral post claims.

A post that has been circulating in different forms since 2015 claims the Apple founder and billionaire died disillusioned with his wealth. 

“In other eyes, my life is the essence of success, but aside from work, I have a little joy. And in the end, wealth is just a fact of life to which I am accustomed,” the post claims Jobs said.

“At this moment, lying on the bed, sick and remembering all my life, I realize that all my recognition and wealth that I have is meaningless in the face of imminent death,” it goes on to say. “You can hire someone to drive a car for you, make money for you — but you can not rent someone to carry the disease for you. One can find material things, but there is one thing that can not be found when it is lost — life.

“Your true inner happiness does not come from the material things of this world. Whether you’re flying first class, or economy class — if the plane crashes, you crash with it.”

The post, made by Sergio Cardenas, then goes on to talk about the importance of seeking happiness, health and love in how you live your life over material possessions. The post has over 36,000 shares.

USA TODAY reached out to Cardenas for comment.

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What did Steve Jobs say on his death bed?

When Jobs died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer, his sister Mona Simpson spoke about his last words as part of her eulogy . 

She said, “With that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Jobs' final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them,” she continued.

“Steve’s final words were: 'Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.'”

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Where did the other speech come from? 

No one who was close to Jobs has ever said the often-circulated essay was ever written or said by Jobs, according to a fact check by Snopes .

Snopes found the speech didn’t start circulating until 2015, four years after his death. 

The version being fact-checked in this article contains slightly different language than the one Snopes checked, but there are enough similarities that there is a clear thread between them. 

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Our rating: False

We rate this claim FALSE, because it is not supported by our research. There is no evidence Steve Jobs used his final moments to deliver a speech against materialism. Instead, a relative has recounted that he looked at those he loved for a long moment before saying “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” 

Our fact-check sources:

• Facebook post
• Snopes, Nov. 8, 2015,  "Steve Jobs Deathbed Speech"
• New York Times, Oct. 30, 2011, "A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs"

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Billionaire investor Ron Baron gets a first-hand demonstration of Tesla’s self-driving tech: ‘I want to see Steve Jobs’ house’

Baron Capital Chairman and CEO Ron Baron recently saw first hand how Tesla’s self-driving technology is progressing with a ride near the company’s campus in California.

The billionaire investor told CNBC on Thursday that he was visiting Elon Musk’s SpaceX near Los Angeles on Monday morning, meeting with engineers and finance staff. Then in the afternoon, he traveled up the coast to Tesla to see employees working on autonomous-driving technology and “the compute people.”

Baron said the 12th iteration of the technology has benefitted from enormous amount of data collected by Tesla cars and by more AI-driven computing power. That’s after earlier versions required more manual coding, which slowed progress.

“Humans can’t do it. Now they have compute to figure everything out. So now you’re on the verge with autonomous driving in your car,” he explained. “So I said, ‘OK, show me.'”

For a couple hours, Tesla staff went over the technology with him. After that, Baron told them he wanted to see how it works before he had to head back to New York.

So they got into a car in the parking lot, accompanied by an analyst and two Tesla employees, he recalled.

“We’re sitting in the car, and so, ‘Where do you want to go?'” Baron continued. “I said, ‘I want to see Steve Jobs’ house.’ And they say, ‘OK,’ and they punch in the address.”

The car departed on its own, driving through the Tesla parking lot and waiting for traffic to pass before turning onto the road.

It turned again and drove behind other cars. When it got to a stop sign at an intersection, the car waited for other drivers before taking its turn while also checking in both directions.

Then a pedestrian started crossing the street, and the car stopped, Baron said. The pedestrian waved at the waiting car, which resumed its trip afterward.

“Then it pulls up and makes a left hand turn and then goes in front of Steve Jobs’ house,” he added. “It’s a nice house, just a house though.”

After that, the car went back: “It drove all by itself.” When pressed by CNBC on the timing of Tesla’s autonomous-driving capabilities, Baron simply answered, “now.”

Tesla did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

The first-hand demonstration of Tesla’s self-driving technology came at a critical time for Musk’s electric vehicle company. On Tuesday, Tesla reported a steep dive in first-quarter profit as falling sales and price cuts hit margins.

But Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief as Musk also said Tesla is moving ahead with a lower-cost EV model , after some analysts had earlier worried that he would prioritize his robo-taxi ambitions instead. Meanwhile, Tesla has also announced job cuts, while a string of top executives are heading out the door .

For his part, Baron remains bullish on Tesla stock, which represents the largest position in his portfolio. Citing the low-cost car and robo-taxis, he predicted shares are “going to go up huge. Now is the bottom .”

Still, he also voiced some frustration with the earlier performance of the stock, up only 1% since this time last year and down overall since the start of 2021. 

“It’s not so exciting to be up 1% in a year when the market is so strong,” he told CNBC. “I do look around all the time and see everyone getting rich—and I’m not poor, but I haven’t made a lot of progress over the last three years, so therefore I think it’s like a rubber band—I’m going to catch up again.”

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