Walter Isaacson is an American journalist, author, and historian who is known for his biographies of prominent historical figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. throughout his career, Isaacson held positions as the CEO of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. His writing focuses on exploring the lives of exceptional individuals and their impact on society, while also highlighting their unique personalities and personal struggles. Isaacson's engaging storytelling and meticulous research has made him widely acclaimed as a guy who certainly knows how to create masterpieces.
The masterpiece under the shittiest microscope of the internet today is Issacson's biography of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs is a man that needs no introduction. He was the founder of Pixar, NeXT and the world's most valuable company, Apple. He is revered in the eyes of many for his creative genius, authoritarian leadership and uncanny marketing ability. Jobs' story recounted in excruciating detail by Walter Isaacson is not merely a triumphant tale of one man and his great companies but rather a story of firm conviction, having pressed forward in spite of personal and professional tragedy. Jobs' grit and relentless pursuit of what he believes has rightfully earned him a spot among the greatest in our history books. Jobs wasn't a technical guy but technicals don't make a company the people do.
Jobs is the exemplary hallmark of a counter-cultural maverick. True creatives are hard to come by, we like to think all of us are creative in our own rights but that is simply not true, creativity is by far the exception, not the normality - true creatives are simply different breeds. What are creative people? I think the answer that Jobs produced sums it up pretty well. In Apple's first Think Different campaign, it spoke:
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
They're people to see things different, do things different, they're constantly playing a different game from the rest of us. On the surface, it may seem like they've fallen behind the game, got stuck behind the eight-ball but as you begin to pry underneath you realise that they're not even playing the same game. A man who constantly dissects the environment around them, who always reads between the lines and chases his newfound uncommon knowledge is naturally a man that is hard to deal with... hard to understand and even harder to measure.
Why am I telling you all this? The more you read about the life of Steve Jobs the more you appreciate his conviction, his aggression and his sheer fucking will. He was in a sense, as a creative, condemned to go down the path he went down. His internal turmoil of abandoning his first-born child, his heartbreak when his mentor ousted him from Apple, his relentless, aggressive pursuit of perfection at the cost of the feelings of the people around him and of course his battle with cancer towards the later stages of his life.
I'm sure almost anyone who knows the name Steve Jobs knows that he's a maverick, a visionary and a bit of a dickhead but I'm sure very few of them know to what extent was he a maverick or a visionary or a dickhead. To truly understand his motivations, his erratic behaviour, his psychopathic tendencies you have to read the pages of Steve Jobs.
