Book of The Month: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

People toss the word icon around today so much that it's losing its true meaning. Much like the words "swag" used to describe someone with no style, class, substance or composure or "reality TV" when used to describe abnormal people doing atypical things in a staged setting without any of the pressures that real people face. But when discussing Steve Jobs if you don't say the word Icon with a capital "I" at least once you're selling dude short.

Steve Jobs was Mark Zuckerberg before Mark Zuckerberg. He's so narcissistic that it fueled his drive to success. Any obstacle he encountered he felt as though it could be overcome in a unique way by him. Simply because he was him. But narcissism isn't logical and in addition to leading to a lifelong dissatisfaction with others and inability to process failure it ultimately contributed to his untimely death from cancer earlier this year.

This book spends a lot of time describing Steve Jobs prickly relationship with family, friends, enemies and peers. At times you wonder if this book was written for the specific purpose of raining on the parade of all the amateur eulogists who didn't know Steve Jobs personally.

I like the way the book details Jobs' failures just as extensively as his successes. In our culture we tend to mythologize successful people to the point of making them infallible. But Steve Jobs quite honestly was an asshole based on all accounts in this book. As a young man with unconventional vegan dieting habits that sometimes crossed that thin line into full blown eating disorders. A man who refused traditional treatment and surgery for cancer that was caught early enough to make a difference. He was forced out of his own company but the executives that he recruited to run it.

Steve almost lost his "cautionary tale" status. You see his arrogance and unconventional business practices became his downfall during his initial stint at Apple. But then he helped Pixar become the top animation studio in the country. And then he returned to Apple and resurrected and revamped after they had lost their status as a consumer electronics company in the late 80's/early 90's and became a producer of niche products.

Steve's return to Apple will undoubtedly become the stuff of legend at business schools around the country and cause a whole generation of failures who think they're smart enough to be as successful while flaunting all the rules the way Steve was. However, in my experience it's best not to think outside the box if you're barely adequate thinking inside the box.

Where the cautionary tale restarts is with the diagnosis of cancer. The author of the book and Steve's friends and colleagues make many mentions of Steve's "reality distortion field". The basic principle is if you ignore the degree of difficulty of a task it becomes almost a forgone conclusion that you will accomplish it. Which is of course a false gimmick on the level of self help gurus and that stupid fucking book "The Secret". A little bit of self-delusion is necessary to give yourself confidence especially in a world where so many people fail miserably at life and don't even realize it. However when your self-delusion stems equally from your white suburban entitlement as well as the fact that you've succeeded so much in the past it can get dangerous.

Getting a person like Jobs to just take the chemo and/or surgery prescribed by conventional doctors to treat the cancer was an impossibility. Someone who can appreciate the hard science of technology would seem foolish to ignore it in the context of medical advice. But Steve lived and died defying expectations. But don't take my word for it, read the book it's really quite interesting.