I wrote this post – Just How Big An Asshole Is Steve Jobs? – when I started Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I had an inkling that he was one. I knew that he denied paternity of his daughter. I knew that he lied to his partner Steve Wozniak about bonus money when they worked for Atari (Wozniak did all the work) in the 70s. I knew about his reality distortion field where bent reality to his will by simply ignoring facts that he didn’t want to accept. In this book, I discovered that he screwed his friend Daniel Kottke out of Apple stock and he was never interested at all in philanthropy.

Nice, polite people are rarely Silicon Valley billionaires.

I still remember when I found out that Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer. My friend Jon, who had an original Macintosh computer in his childhood home, told me.

“Well what does he do then?” I asked.

“Well…um, so… yeah…”

I just re-watched this clip from Steve Jobs the movie (embedded below). It’s the scene before the unveiling of the NeXT machine and Wozniak confronts Jobs and asks him just what do you do? (Incidentally, I thought Seth Rogen and Michael Fassbender were both terribly miscast, Fassbender, especially; his Jobs is slick, whereas the real Jobs – judging from clips – was severely intense, with a high-pitched sibilant voice) Jobs replies, “I play the orchestra.” It’s a cute Sorkin-y line but, seriously, what did Steve Jobs do? I realized that this is the crux of my fascination with Jobs. What did he actually do? Or to quote the fictional Wozniak from the movie, “How come I read ten times a day that Steve Jobs is a genius?”

I’m not going to dispute the fact that he is one. You can’t argue with the results. You only have to look at Apple with him and Apple without him. Look at Pixar. The iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad were all pushed forward by him and so many of us rely on them (even those who do without them are the exceptions that prove the rule because they are trying to avoid dependence on the devices, not the devices themselves).

I will say with no hint of irony or sarcasm that it is completely possible that ins and outs of strategic thinking regarding technology are beyond my grasp. In other words, I just may not be smart enough to understand how smart Steve Jobs was.

But also, for Christ’s sake what did he do?

In another important fictional line from the above clip, Woz says, “this guy here is someone you invented.” Jobs’s talent was in branding and salesmanship and, frankly, in style. I think of the Emo Philips joke which I’ll paraphrase. I used to think the brain was the most important organ in my body then I thought, well, look who’s telling me that. Jobs styled himself as a genius, is it possible that we just bought the image he was selling?

Jobs was fond of a few things. One of them was telling people, “This is shit.” Seriously. He did it all the time. He was extremely impatient when things weren’t working out the way he wanted, i.e., when people who were actually engineers weren’t making his exact vision. He was also fond of telling people that an idea they had wouldn’t work, then deciding on his own that it would, and a little while later, bringing the idea up as if he had though of it himself.

He said that Bill Gates never created anything in his life. He also got into it with a writer once saying, “What have you ever created?” But what did Steve Jobs create?

I think of that apocryphal tale of a sculptor who is asked, “How to you sculpt and elephant?” The sculptor replies, “I start with a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” What the sculptor doesn’t do is start with a block of marble and then yell “this is shit” at some people with chisels until he’s happy with the elephant that they’ve made for him.

Steve Jobs was at the forefront of the personal computer revolution. That cannot be argued. His vision for the personal computer – aided by his pioneering of the Macintosh – along with related devices – the iPod and iPad – has come to be. But he did not start nor did he make the only contribution to the personal computer revolution. That also is patently obvious.

So, I found myself trying to figure him out. I started with the premise that he was kind of an asshole and I was not disabused of this idea.

Special

The word “special” is all over this book with regards to Jobs. He always believed that he was special. He knew that he was adopted and he also knew from a very young age that he was smarter than his parents.

Rebel

He liked to think of himself as a rebel but in the grand scheme of things he was a CEO of a technology company. And the ways in which he styled himself as a rebel were frankly pretty annoying.

When he was young, he rarely wore shoes and thought that he didn’t need to bathe (everyone else knew otherwise). When he got rich, he parked in handicapped spots. He didn’t have a license plate on his Mercedes because he thought he didn’t need one. He once got pulled over by a cop for speeding and told him, “I have somewhere to be.”

There’s a difference between standing up to the status quo and being so damned arrogant that you think that you shouldn’t have to put up with the minutiae of daily life. Jobs was in the latter camp. (As a New Yorker, this behavior especially upsets me. How do you piss off a New Yorker the most? Cut in a line or bypass a line. Millions of us live here and there is a delicate social order that we’ve all tacitly agreed to. Do not fuck this up.)

Artist

Look, graphic designers and product designers and copywriters are all creative. They have a passion and a level of skill in their chosen field that could perhaps be considered artistry. But are they artists?

No. If you work for an ad agency or a tech start-up or any kind of business, you may be doing great work but you’re doing it for the bread, not for the artistry.

A full discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this post but suffice it to say that I believe that art and commerce don’t mix. So, when Jobs would talk about being an artist or respecting so ‘n so for being an artist, I would roll my eyes.

Which brings me to some famous ad campaigns.

Change The World/”They push the human race forward”

Their 1984 Super Bowl ad is considered by many to be the greatest ad of all time. But holy shit is it arrogant.

The Macintosh will break you free from the prison of conformity!

And then there’s the Think Different campaign (the Steve Jobs narrated version, the original ad was narrated by Richard Dreyfuss).

How did he get away with images of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.? Hell, even Dylan and Picasso are a stretch.

This was his brand and he created it brilliantly. He was able to make people who bought Macs think that they were creative, that they were plucky rebels and misfits changing the world, that they were pushing humanity forward.

But for Christ’s sake, it’s just a computer.

I want to talk about those two pieces of dialogue. “They push the human race forward,” was inserted into the copy by Jobs himself. And also, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

I hear this and I think that Jobs is talking about himself and how he and his products changed the world. I may be projecting. But have iPhones and iPads and the iTunes store changed the world? Have they pushed humanity forward? Is being able to text videos to your friends and have a map on you at all times and watch Netflix anywhere changed the world?

I don’t think so.

I made a new year’s resolution to not look at my phone while waiting for or riding in an elevator. I’ve stuck with it. Since doing it, I’ve realized that I am often the only person in an elevator not looking at his phone. Did Jobs create tools to augment the human race’s potential? Or did he create a new opiate for the masses?

When I think of people changing the world, I think of people who inspire, who truly bring about social change, who put their lives on the line to help people break free. I think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony, and Rosa Parks. I don’t think of Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie or William Randolph Hearst. Jobs belongs in the latter group, not the former.

(I may have gotten a little carried away myself just now.)

The Case for Jobs

So, what is my problem? I honestly don’t know. This is one of my weaknesses. I don’t understand what he did and when I don’t understand something, I try to think my way through the problem, which just leads to more and more frustration. And this is the result, I’m a blogger venting my petty frustrations with a dead man.

I love Apple products. I “switched” and bough my first eMac (yeah, eMac, that’s not a typo, google it, it was a decent computer) and never looked back. I loved my first iPod. I love my iPhone. (But both as a developer and a human, I hate the iPad, I just don’t need it.) I’m a loyal Apple customer.

I found Jobs’s baby boomer crap a little annoying. How much he loved Dylan and the Beatles, constantly saying how important LSD was to his thinking, being a dirty (literally) barefoot dude talking about Zen and how eye opening his trip to India was. But if he were my friend’s dad, I’d probably get a kick out of him.

He was a leader and only a leader. He was a visionary, an idea man. Many people claim to be that but so few are the real thing (as all of the Apple CEOs of the Jobs-less years proved). He couldn’t lead by example because he wasn’t an engineer but he did lead.

You can’t argue with his results both with Apple and with Pixar. Without Steve Jobs, I wouldn’t be typing on this computer right now.

The one thing that I was inspired by was all of the engineers relating a similar story that Jobs was a nightmare to work for but, in the end, they all valued the experience because he pushed them to do things that they never thought were possible. I really respect that.