The Philippine Online Chronicles

I could hardly put it down. Every spare moment I had in the days following the release of Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs was spent reading it, in Apple devices, no less. It seemed appropriate.

“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three and the way I handled that,” Jobs told Isaacson. “But I don’t have any skeletons in my closest that can’t be allowed out.” So Isaacson wrote his biography on Steve Jobs without Jobs seeking any control, except over choosing the cover art.

Isaacson fills in the gaps for those who have followed Jobs’ career. For those who haven’t been following Jobs, Isaacson’s book is an eye opener into his messy and complicated life. And yet, to say Jobs was complicated is a bit of an understatement.

Jobs was adopted by working class parents. His adopted father was a mechanic who Steve owed much to. The detail and craftsmanship that goes into every Apple product could be traced to Paul Jobs, who instilled in his son the value of craftsmanship: even if nobody would ever see the inside of a cabinet, it should be as beautiful as the outside. This resonates in every Apple product that has come out, especially during the Second Era of Jobs.

Steve Jobs’ experience with LSD was a fundamental aspect of his history. He was a child of counterculture, a vegan hippie who rebuilt one of the world’s most valued company— a company which he co-founded— from the brink of bankruptcy. It is an interesting dichotomy. Here was a hippie who relished the idea of being paid US$1.00 a year at Apple, but enjoy millions of dollars worth of stock options from the company. He was a billionaire who drove a Mercedes without license plates, and got away with it. He refused to wear deodorant, arguing his vegan diet was enough for him not to smell.

Isaacson also tells us stories of how Steve Jobs ripped off a whole lot of people in his youth, even people who started working with him at Apple from the beginning. Isaacson recounts Jobs’ days before, during and after Reed College, and how he got his girlfriend pregnant but refused to acknowledge her.

Steve Jobs was a romantic, Isaacson wrote. But he was also, in the words of former girlfriend Joan Baez, “afraid to be romantic”. In the book, Baez recalled a time they visited the Stanford Mall. She saw a beautiful red dress that he said would be perfect for her. But when he got a bunch of shirts for himself, he told her, “You ought to buy it.” Baez surprised, and said she couldn’t afford it. He didn’t buy it. They left.

Steve would tell Isaacson that he only loved two women in his life. The first one was Tina Redse, and the second was his wife, Laurene Powell. Isaacson quoted Smith, Powell’s roommate, “Steve would fluctuate between intense focus, where she was the center of the universe, to being coldly distant and focused on work”. It was classic Jobs. It was a mentality he would take to everything including work, and even relationships with his children.

There are stories of how Steve was with his kids. Steve probably related less with his daughters than to than his only son, Reed. Lisa, his eldest child had a constant roller coaster relationship with Steve. Middle child Erin is in Isaacson’s words, “A little quieter, and suffered from not getting much of her father’s attention”. The youngest Jobs— Eve— is a “firecracker who, neither needy nor intimidated, knew how to handler her father,” and at times even succeeded at negotiating with him. At one point in the book, Isaacson revealed that Steve joked Eve would run Apple one day.

As maddening a life was for the Apple CEO, and also a part owner of Disney, Jobs and his family were remarkably down-to-earth. The Jobs family home wasn’t a grand mansion. When other CEOs had entourages, and security, his family lived in a cozy home in Palo Alto. There were numerous stories of Jobs walking around Palo Alto like any normal person.

So where’s the crazy part? Jobs and his wife took a long time to furnish their home. They talked about style and design, and functionality. Even a simple purchase like a laundry machine took forever. It was a constant topic at their family dinner table: did they want clothes to last longer, and take a longer time washing, or was it ok for the washer to be fast?

Jobs treated the washer, like everything else in his life, be it relationships or technology, or business - according to Isaacson, “If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter, and when he was first diagnosed with cancer”. When first diagnosed with cancer, Jobs took to a strict vegan diet, herbal remedies and acupuncture. Only a year later was he forced to have his operation.

Until the end, even withering in pain, Jobs was hard at work designing the next big thing. He was designing a yacht, with the same minimalist and exacting standards as the Apple products. He was hard at work with plans for the next Apple Campus, and Jobs told Isaacson he had cracked the puzzle of TV and wanted to bring Apple’s touch to that space.

That was the genius, and yet at every turn he had his demons. He wasn’t ashamed of it. Neither was his family.

“There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth”, Laurene Powell-Jobs told Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully”.

Isaacson described Steve’s widow Laurene as “one of the smartest, and most grounded people I have ever met”.

If Walter Isaacson whitewashed this tale it is hard to see. Steve Jobs was a man of great contradictions. A hippie capitalist, a romantic and not so romantic; he was sensitive and he used that ability to empathize with hurt people. He was a dotting father, and a terrible one. Isaacson writes, “Jangling inside him were the contradictions of a counterculture rebel turned business entrepreneur, someone who wanted to believe he had turned on and tuned in without having sold out and cashed in.”

“OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW,” Steve Jobs’ sister, Mona Simpson recalled her brother’s last words in her eulogy for him.

Steve Jobs was a child of counterculture until the end.

Photo credit: Matt Yohe, WikiMedia Commons, some rights reserved.