Abstract
A devoted Apple user, I am captivated by the aesthetics and elegance of the brand. As such, I am the consumer Steve Jobs set out to create. Perhaps in a way not unrelated to that bias, I offer fair warning that this is not the usual book review. The volume has a nominal author, but to me Steve Jobs’s personality overshadows the book itself; in a sense, he is its actual author.
Walter Isaacson had written biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Kissinger. Already diagnosed with cancer, Jobs pursued Isaacson: “I realized other people would write about me if I died. . . . So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say” (p. 557). Almost everything Jobs did was orchestrated, so it would have been out of character to leave legacy to chance. To his credit, however, Jobs did not put Isaacson on a leash, nor was the manuscript subject to review. Thus we are given a portrait of a creative but blemished human being.
Jobs was the biological child of a German Catholic Wisconsin farm girl, Joanne Schieble, and a Syrian Muslim, Abdulfattah Jandali, a University of Wisconsin teaching assistant. Marriage then was not an option, so Ms. Schieble put her son up for adoption—by college graduates only. Despite that proviso, the baby went to the working class, high-school dropout Jobs family—after they agreed in writing to send him to college (pp. 1–4).
When young Steve was two, Paul and Clara Jobs adopted a daughter, Patty. No small matter for any two-year-old, this arrival is interesting since Patty is essentially absent from Jobs’s narrative and seems not to have been pursued by his biographer. Jobs did have a childhood memory of telling a neighbor girl he was adopted. She asked if that meant his real parents didn’t want him. “Lightning bolts went off in my head. . . . I remember running into the house, crying” (p. 4). His parents reassured him that they had chosen him. In fact, “Abandoned. Chosen. Special . . . [and perhaps replaceable] became part of who Jobs was . . .” (p. 4).
Paul and Clara Jobs may well have wondered what they had adopted. As a child, Steve Jobs was headstrong and petulant but extraordinary. “Both my parents . . . felt a lot of responsibility once they sensed I was special. . . . They were willing to defer to my needs” (p. 11). What was true in childhood was true throughout his life. Egocentric behavior was tolerated within an aura of brilliance. He was then, and forever after, a wunderkind.
His interest in electronics was straightforward, but the rest of his young life was not. By his senior year in high school he was regularly smoking marijuana and dabbling in hashish, LSD, and mind-bending sleep deprivation. He insisted on going to a college his parents could ill afford, but got bored and dropped out. With typical intensity, he took up Zen, embraced vegetarianism to the point of food faddism and perhaps bulimia, made a pilgrimage to India, underwent primal scream therapy, and developed a lifelong tendency to silently stare without blinking, . . . honing “his trick of using stares and silences to master other people” (p. 38). He often went barefoot and refused to bathe, insisting—despite all protests to the contrary—that because he ate a fruit and vegetable diet, he did not have body odor (p. 43). He often lived in an apple orchard commune and returned to the farm periodically. In fact, Jobs and Apple’s cofounder, Steve Wozniak, chose the name Apple Computers the day after he pruned those apple trees (p. 63).
Jobs does not emerge from these pages as a nice man. In a kind of symmetry, he abandoned his pregnant girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, and their daughter, Lisa Brennan, as he had been abandoned. As Chrisann said, “He was an enlightened being who was cruel” (p. 89).
He ultimately had a relationship with his biological family, but it too had its rifts. After Clara Jobs died, Jobs sought out his biological mother. He discovered that she and his father had subsequently married briefly and had a daughter whom they kept, his sister, the writer Mona Simpson. While Jobs developed a relationship of sorts with his biological mother and sister, he had no such relationship with his father. Mona Simpson tracked down their father working in a small restaurant in Sacramento. Jobs refused to go to the meeting and swore his sister to silence about him. During that meeting, “her father casually remarked that he and her mother had another baby, a boy . . .” (pp. 256–257). She said nothing about Jobs. Even more pointedly, “Jandali . . . wished she could have seen him when he was managing a . . . restaurant north of San Jose. . . . ‘All of the successful technology people used to come there. Even Steve Jobs . . .’” (p. 257). Again, she said nothing. When she related the story to Jobs, he could remember the balding Syrian man with whom he had shaken hands. Jobs never sought out his father, and Jandali, who later found out about Jobs, never tried to meet him (p. 258). Why father and son avoided each other is a question left hanging. Jobs’s worry about blackmail or publicity and the description of Jandali as “very, very passive” seem inadequate as explanations (pp. 257–258).
If Jobs’s personal life had humble origins, so did his start in business. Apple I was assembled by hand in the Jobs’s garage in Los Altos. Based on a design by Wozniak, it was given its commercial birth by some meager finances and a few orders that came from Jobs’s badgering of suppliers and outlets. If Apple I looked “as scruffy as its creators” (p. 70), Apple II was a sleek and integrated machine thanks to Jobs’s insistence on good design. Paul Jobs had a love of craftsmanship, a quality that was to become one of his son’s trademarks. Jobs recalled, “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see” (p. 6). As Jobs later elaborated that principle, “[To] most . . . design means veneer. . . . But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers” (p. 343).
Despite the strains between the low-key Wozniak and the high-octane Jobs, both realized that to “make the Apple II successful required more than . . . Wozniak’s awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs’s role” (p. 73). Isaacson suggests there would never have been a computer without Wozniak, but it would never have been more than a hobbyist’s toy were it not for Jobs (p. 85).
In business as in life, Jobs was self-centered but strangely inspiring. He readily appropriated others’ ideas as his own. “If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you . . . it’s stupid. . . . if he actually likes it . . . he’ll come back . . . and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it” (p. 120). He characteristically operated through his “reality distortion field”: “To some . . . , calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling. He would assert something . . . without even considering the truth. It came from willfully defying reality, not only to others but to himself. . . . At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him. . . . If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter [Lisa] and would do . . . when . . . diagnosed with cancer” (pp. 118–119).
On the one hand, ignoring seeming impossibility led to great accomplishments; “even though Jobs’s style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief they could accomplish what seemed impossible” (p. 124). On the other, it also led to trivially banal actions like refusing to put a license plate on his car or insisting on parking in handicapped spaces (p. 119).
As much as Apple II had been a success, Apple III flopped, and Jobs set out to create a new computer. Perhaps in some kind of restitution, he named the new project “Lisa” after his abandoned daughter. Jobs wanted “Lisa” to be a technological leap forward. The necessary technology, however, was not at Apple but at Xerox. By allowing a purchase of Apple stock, Jobs got access to the game-changing technology. “The Apple raid on Xerox . . . is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry [a view] Jobs occasionally endorsed. . . . ‘Picasso had a saying—good artists copy, great artists steal—and we have . . . been shameless about stealing great ideas’ ” (p. 98).
Whatever the great ideas, Jobs at that point in his career was not ready to be a chief executive. For that job he recruited John Sculley from Pepsi, but the initial honeymoon between the two did not last. “Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley. . . . And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous of him he became. . . . Sculley began to believe that Jobs’s mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps . . . bipolarity. There were big mood swings; sometimes ecstatic, at other times . . . depressed. . . . he would launch into brutal tirades without warning . . .” (pp. 156–157). Despite corporate conflicts, the Macintosh was introduced in 1984 with the famous Super Bowl ad of the young woman representing Apple destroying Big Brother and his clones (read IBM and other non-Apple computer makers). Despite the fanfare, both Apple III and the initial Macintosh sold poorly. In the corporate clash that predictably followed, the directors sided with Sculley. Apple’s stock rose with the news of Jobs’s departure.
At loose ends, Jobs founded the computer company NeXT, soon to be in financial trouble itself. In the midst of all this, Jobs bought a branch of Lucasfilms that made computers for rendering digital images. The idea was that profits would come from selling “Pixar Image Computers” to animators and graphic designers. While not enough were sold to turn a profit, the animation showed promise, especially a story about toys. When Toy Story became a blockbuster, Jobs organized a Pixar IPO that was so phenomenally successful that his $50 million investment turned into $1.2 billion.
Meanwhile, in his absence Apple drifted into decline. “It had taken Microsoft a few years to replicate Macintosh’s graphical user interface, but by 1990 it . . . began the . . . march to dominance in the desktop market” (p. 296). In fact, before Jobs’s return Apple began to consider using Microsoft Windows NT as Apple’s operating system, a deal Bill Gates was eager to make (p. 298). When Apple decided to go with Jobs and NeXT, Gates “went into orbit. . . . Don’t you understand that Steve doesn’t know anything about technology? He’s just a super salesman. . . . 99% of what he says and thinks is wrong . . .” (p. 302).
In fact, Jobs and Gates complemented each other. The college dropout Jobs was the paragon of total control. Apple products are integrated with one another but are not licensed. The college dropout Bill Gates was the exponent of open platforms, licensing his software readily and widely. In consequence, Apple products work beautifully, though exclusively within the product line, whereas Windows software is everywhere. Despite the rivalry, one of the first things Jobs did upon returning to Apple was to negotiate a Microsoft commitment to make software for Apple and financially invest in the company. “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose . . . , if we want Microsoft Office in the Mac, we better treat the company . . . with a little bit of gratitude. . . .” This announcement, “along with Jobs’s . . . re-engagement with the company . . . added [in a one-day stock jump] $830 million to Apple’s . . . market capitalization. The company was back from the edge of the grave” (p. 326).
It was eleven years from ouster to return. The first new product out of the box was the iMac, the fastest selling computer in Apple history. In January 2000 Jobs rolled out the new Macintosh operating system, OSX. Now that he had new products in the stream, Jobs did not want “an iMac to sit on a shelf between a Dell and a Compaq while . . . [a] clerk recited the specs . . .” (p. 369). Always proactive, on May 19, 2001, Jobs opened the first Apple Store, located in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. By 2004 Apple Stores had $1.2 billion in revenue, setting a retail record for reaching the billion-dollar milestone (p. 374).
As Jobs’s ideas developed, he began to conceive of the computer as a digital hub. “Apple would no longer be just a computer company—indeed it would drop that word from its name—but the Macintosh would be . . . the hub for an astounding array . . . including the iPod and iPhone and iPad” (p. 379). Soon Jobs “set out to create an ‘iTunes Store’ and to persuade the five top record companies to allow digital versions of their songs to be sold there” (p. 396). The companies were reluctant but persuadable because piracy had knocked the bottom out of their profits.
Jobs’s business struggles were perhaps made more tolerable by some solid ground in his personal life. In 1989, Laurene Powell had walked into one of Jobs’s lectures at Stanford Business School and by happenstance was seated next to him. They flirted, dated, and married, when he was thirty-six and she twenty-seven. His friends all considered him lucky to have found her. Though Jobs was a billionaire, the couple moved into a “charming and unpretentious house on a corner in a family-friendly neighborhood in old Palo Alto” (p. 275). They had three children: a son, Reed Paul, a daughter, Erin Siena, and another daughter, Eve. Indeed, his children were one motivation for the biography: “I wanted my kids to know me. . . . I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did” (p. 556). He was not there because he was building two major corporations. “Jobs was known during his career for creating great products. But just as significant was his ability to create great companies with valuable brands. And he created two of the best of his era: Apple and Pixar” (p. 292).
In fact, Jobs speculated that his cancer was caused by the grueling years he spent running the companies: “he had developed kidney stones and other ailments, and he would come home so exhausted that he could barely speak” (p. 452). A 2003 CAT scan of his troublesome kidneys showed a shadow on his pancreas, which at biopsy was an islet cell tumor. “To the horror of his friends and wife, Jobs decided not to have surgery . . .” (p. 453), opting instead for dietary, acupuncture, and herbal remedies. “Part of [his delay and denial] . . . was the product of the dark side of his reality distortion field . . . filter[ing] out things he did not wish to deal with . . .” (p. 454). In 2004, however, another CAT scan showed the tumor had grown and he acquiesced to a modified Whipple procedure that removed parts of his stomach, intestine, and pancreas. Liver metastases, however, were already present. “One side effect of the operation [with loss of pancreatic digestive enzymes] would become a [nutritional] problem for Jobs because of his obsessive diets and weird routines of purging and fasting practiced since he was a teenager” (p. 455). He needed to eat more protein-rich meat and fish but never had and never would (p. 455). In March 2009, while in public denial that his cancer had spread to his liver, he nonetheless had a liver transplant. Again it was too late. At surgery, there were already peritoneal metastases.
His cancer and its treatment established a vicious cycle: “cancer caused pain. The morphine and other painkillers . . . suppressed his appetite. . . . his digestive system was faulty and had trouble absorbing protein. Losing weight made it harder to embark on aggressive drug therapies. His emaciated condition . . . made him more susceptible to infections, as did the immunosuppressants. . . . he was prone to extreme mood swings, marked by prolonged bouts of anger and depression. . . . He refused . . . to be treated in any way for his depression. . . . He became morose, tearful, and dramatic as he lamented . . . that he was about to die” (pp. 548–549).
The apparent psychological instability, however, could not obliterate the creativity. In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he said, “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. . . . almost everything . . . fall[s] 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 . . . thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart” (p. 457).
Always creative and combative, in the midst of dying Jobs introduced the iPad, fought with Google over its Android system, and struggled with Adobe. His last venture was the iCloud. “In 2001, Jobs had a vision: Your personal computer would serve as a ‘digital hub’ for . . . music players, video recorders, phones, and tablets. . . . The company was thus transformed from a high-end niche computer company to the most valuable technology company in the world. By 2008, Jobs had developed a vision for the next wave of the digital era. . . . your desktop computer would no longer serve as the hub. . . . Instead the hub would move to ‘the cloud.’ . . . content would be stored on remote servers managed by a company you trusted, and . . . available . . . on any device, anywhere” (pp. 530–531).
Toward the end, he asked an old colleague, “Tell me what I was like when I was young.” In answer, she said, “You were very impetuous and very difficult. . . . But your vision was compelling” (p. 537). As Isaacson puts it, “Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were . . . at times magical. . . . Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era . . . in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford” (p. 566). Jobs’s accomplishments are legendary, but perhaps his proudest creation was the Apple Corporation itself, where “imagination was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways so creative that it became the most valuable company on earth” (p. 566).
Jobs was a colossus with feet of clay. One girlfriend “would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell” (pp. 264–265). As a close colleague said, “Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that” (p. 462). “It was in Jobs’s nature to mislead . . . when he felt it was warranted. But he also indulged in being brutally honest. . . . Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn’t apply to him” (p. 313).
Isaacson suggests that Jobs’s abandonment by his biological parents remained an undigested part of him. Perhaps so. He was often emotionally labile and apparently was incapable of emotional shades of gray. Everything he came into contact with—food, designs, products—were either “shit” or “the best thing ever.” “People were either ‘enlightened’ or ‘an asshole.’ Their work was either ‘the best’ or ‘totally shitty’” (p. 119). Computers function in a binary, on/off, zero/one, black/white world and, often, so did Jobs.
Steve Jobs is far from a psychoanalytic study of a world-changing individual. So why are we reviewing it in JAPA? Despite our reputation to the contrary, psychoanalysts are interested in the world and the technological advances that are remaking it. We are also interested in the psychoanalytic study of game-changers, in what really makes them tick. We know that people are driven by unconscious engines only dimly perceived. For Jobs, one can easily postulate that the unconscious engine was a very powerful one indeed. It is in this department, however, that we are destined to remain frustrated. It is too soon, and there are too many relatives and others still alive who are deeply invested in the person and the legend, for us to indulge in speculation.
Let me put it a slightly different way: should Jobs be diagnosed? He was by a girlfriend who “read in a psychiatric manual about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and decided that Jobs perfectly met the criteria” (pp. 265–266). If my observations of the world are accurate, however, the poor are given diagnoses and the rich are called eccentric. While it is within the realm of possibility that Jobs could be considered eccentric, perhaps the best one can say now is that, from beginning to end, the wunderkind was a wonderfully creative enfant terrible.