I had just watched the movie “Steve Jobs” starring Michael Fassbender and I was fascinated by it. I had a voucher from Sarasavi bookshop that was about to expire, so I decided to buy the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. This was the first biography I ever read. I had thought earlier that biographies were written in a way that it always showed the subject in a good light, but I was wrong. Walter Isaacson portrays Steve Jobs as a complex character, who was both brilliant and deeply flawed. Jobs specifically requested Isaacson to write the biography and granted him complete editorial control, telling him not to shield his flaws.
Design Philosophy
I wasn’t expecting to take away a lot of design philosophies from this book, but this book is filled with them. One of the most important design philosophies of Steve Jobs was that design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. He really valued simplicity in design.
“It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”
When Apple was designing the first ipod, Jobs’s relentless demand to the team was to “Simplify!”. He reviewed every single screen of the user interface and applied a rigid rule: if he wanted a song or a specific function, he had to be able to get there in three clicks, and the path had to be entirely intuitive. This philosophy is was also applied to other Apple products.
Troubled Life
Steve was an adopted child, and the book goes into detail about how this had a profound impact on his life. Later on his life, his denial of responsibility over his daughter Lisa is also well documented here. Jobs even went to the extent of saying “28% of the male population in America can be the father” to a Time magazine reporter.
Apart from his family life, his career at Apple and his treatment of his employees are also well documented here. When the company prepared to go public, Jobs completely denied stock options to early employees like Daniel Kottke, Steve Wozniak had to sell his own shares cheaply to employees so they could afford homes, and years earlier, Jobs had even cheated Wozniak out of a Atari Breakout engineering bonus.
Notable Quotes
“Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive,unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.” – Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple” – Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs