Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  Steve recognized a few of the folks. Robert Friedland, the guy who had convinced him to make a pilgrimage to India in 1974, came up and said hello. And he recognized Weir, of course; he admired the Grateful Dead, even though he thought they didn’t have the emotional or intellectual depth of Bob Dylan. Steve had been invited to the gathering by Brilliant, whom he’d first met in India, five years earlier. After Friedland sent him a 1978 article detailing the success of the smallpox program and talking a bit about Brilliant’s next steps, Steve sent Brilliant five thousand dollars to help get Seva rolling.

  It was quite a collection of people: Hindus and Buddhists, rockers and doctors, all accomplished, all gathered in the United Church of Christ’s Garden of Allah. Clearly, this was not the place for your traditional corporate chieftain, but Steve should have fit right in. He meditated often. He understood the search for spiritual fulfillment—in fact, he had gone to India specifically to learn from Brilliant’s guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji, who had died just a few days before Steve arrived. Jobs felt a deep restlessness to change the world, not just build a mundane business. The iconoclasm, the intersections of different disciplines, the humanity present in that room, all were representative of what Steve aspired to. And yet for some reason he couldn’t settle in.

  There were at least twenty people in the room Steve didn’t recognize, and the conversation had not quieted or slowed much when he introduced himself. It seemed to him that many of them didn’t even know who he was, which was a little surprising, especially in the Bay Area. Apple was already something of a phenomenon: the company was selling more than 3,000 computers a month—up from around 70 a month at the end of 1977. No computer company had ever blossomed this way, and Steve was sure the next year would be even more explosive.

  He sat down and started listening. The decision to create a foundation had already been made; the question now on the table was how to tell the world about Seva, its plans, and the men and women who would implement those plans. Steve found most of the ideas embarrassingly naïve. The discussion seemed more appropriate for a PTA meeting; at one point, everyone but Steve heatedly debated the finer points of a pamphlet they wanted to create. A pamphlet? That’s the best these people could dream up? These so-called experts may have achieved notable progress in their own countries, but here they were clearly out of their league. Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. That seemed obvious.

  As the discussion meandered, Steve found his own attention wandering. “He had walked into that room with his persona from the Apple board meeting,” Brilliant remembers, “but the rules for doing things like conquering blindness or eradicating smallpox are quite different.” From time to time he’d pipe up, but mostly to interject a snide remark about why this or that idea could never fly. “He was becoming a nuisance,” says Brilliant. Finally, Steve couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you this as someone who knows a thing or two about marketing. We’ve sold nearly a hundred thousand machines at Apple Computer, and when we started no one knew a thing about us. Seva is in the same position Apple was in a couple of years ago. The difference is you guys don’t know diddly about marketing. So if you want to really do something here, if you really want to make a difference in the world and not just putter along like every other nonprofit that people have never heard of, you need to hire this guy named Regis McKenna—he’s the king of marketing. I can get him in here if you’d like. You should have the best. Don’t settle for second best.”

  The room went silent for a moment. “Who is this young man?” Venkataswamy whispered to Brilliant. A handful of people started challenging Steve from different sides of the table. He gave as good as he got, turning the group discussion into a donnybrook, ignoring the fact that these were people who had helped eradicate smallpox from the planet, who were saving the blind of India, who negotiated cross-border treaties so they could perform their good works in multiple, even warring, countries. In other words, these were people who knew a thing or two about getting things done. Steve didn’t care about their accomplishments. He was always comfortable in a fight. Challenges, confrontations: in his limited experience, this was how you got things done; this was how the great stuff broke through. As the conversation heated up, Brilliant finally interjected: “Steve.” And then he yelled, “Steve!”

  Steve looked over, clearly irritated by the interruption and anxious to get back to his argument.

  “Steve,” said Brilliant, “we’re really glad you’re here, but now you’ve got to stop it!”

  “I’m not going to,” he said. “You guys asked for my help, and I’m going to give it. You want to know what to do? You need to call Regis McKenna. Let me tell you about Regis McKenna. He—”

  “Steve!” Brilliant shouted again. “Stop it!” But Steve wouldn’t. He just had to get his point across. So he took up his argument yet again, pacing back and forth as if he’d purchased the stage with his five-thousand-dollar donation, pointing directly at the people he was addressing as if to punctuate his remarks. And as the epidemiologists and the doctors and Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead looked on, Brilliant finally pulled the plug. “Steve,” he said, sotto voce, trying to remain calm, but ultimately losing it. “It’s time to go.” Brilliant walked Steve out of the conference room.

  Fifteen minutes later, Friedland slipped outside. He returned quickly, and discreetly crept over to Brilliant. “You should go see Steve,” he whispered in his ear. “He’s out in the parking lot crying.”

  “He’s still here?” Brilliant asked.

  “Yeah, and he’s crying in the parking lot.”

  Brilliant, who was presiding over the meeting, excused himself and hurriedly walked out to find his young friend, who was hunched over the steering wheel of his Mercedes convertible, sobbing, in the middle of the parking lot. The rain had stopped, and the fog had begun to settle in. He had put the top down. “Steve,” said Brilliant, leaning over the door and giving the twenty-four-year-old a hug. “Steve. It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m too wound up,” Steve said. “I live in two worlds.”

  “It’s okay. You should come back in.”

  “I’m going to leave. I know I was out of order. I just wanted them to listen.”

  “It’s okay. Come back in.”

  “I’m going to go in and apologize. And then I’m going to leave,” he said. And that is what he did.

  THIS LITTLE ANECDOTE from the winter of 1979 is as good a place as any to start the story of how Steve Jobs turned around his life and became the greatest visionary leader of our time. The young man making a hash of his visit to the Garden of Allah that December evening was a mess of contradictions. He was a cofounder of one of the most successful startups ever, but he didn’t want to be seen as a businessman. He craved the advice of mentors, and yet resented those in power. He dropped acid, walked barefoot, wore scraggly jeans, and liked the idea of living in a commune, yet he also loved nothing more than speeding down the highway in a finely crafted German sports car. He had a vague desire to support good causes, but he hated the inefficiency of most charities. He was impatient as hell and knew that the only problems worth solving were ones that would take years to tackle. He was a practicing Buddhist and an unrepentant capitalist. He was an overbearing know-it-all berating people who were wiser and immensely more experienced, and yet he was absolutely right about their fundamental marketing naïveté. He could be aggressively rude and then truly contrite. He was intransigent, and yet eager to learn. He walked away, and he walked back in to apologize. At the Garden of Allah he displayed all the brash, ugly behavior that became an entrenched part of the Steve Jobs myth. And he showed a softer side that would go less recognized over the years. To truly understand Steve and the incredible journey he was about to undergo, the full transformation that he would experience over his rich life, you have to recognize, accept,
and try to reconcile both sides of the man.

  He was the leader and public face of the personal computer industry, and yet he was still a kid—just twenty-four years old, still in the early days of his business education. His greatest strengths were inextricably tied to his greatest weaknesses. As of 1979, those failings had not yet gotten in the way of his success.

  In the years ahead, however, Steve’s tight bundle of contradictions would unravel. His stubborn strengths would give rise to Apple’s signature computer, the Macintosh, which would debut in 1984. But his weaknesses would lead to chaos in his company and exile for him personally, just one year later. They would sabotage his efforts to create a second breakthrough computer at NeXT, the company he founded shortly after leaving Apple. They would lead him so far from the heart of the computer industry that he would become, in the damning words of one of his closest friends, “a has-been.” They became so ingrained in his business reputation that when he was improbably invited back to run Apple in 1997, commentators, and even industry peers, would call the company’s board of directors “crazy.”

  But then he pulled off one of the greatest business comebacks ever, leading Apple to the creation of a series of amazing products that defined an era and transformed a dying manufacturer of computers into the most valuable and admired company in the world. That turnaround wasn’t a random miracle. While away from Apple, Steve Jobs had started to learn how to make the most of his strengths, and how to temper somewhat his perilous weaknesses. This reality runs counter to the common myths about Steve. In the popular imagination, he is a tyrant savant with a golden touch for picking products and equally a stubborn son of a bitch with no friends, no patience, and no morals; he lived and died as he was born—half genius and half asshole.

  The unformed youth at the Garden of Allah could never have revived the moribund company he returned to in 1997, nor could he have engineered the slow and deeply complicated corporate evolution that led to the unimaginable success Apple enjoyed during the last decade of his life. His own personal growth was equally complicated. I can’t think of a businessman who grew and changed and matured more than Steve. Personal change is, of course, incremental. As all “grown-ups” come to understand, we wrestle with and learn how to manage our gifts and flaws over a lifetime. It’s an endless growth process. And yet it’s not as if we become wholly different people. Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths. His negative qualities didn’t go away, nor were they replaced by new good traits. But he learned how to manage himself, his own personal miasma of talents and rough edges. Most of them, anyway. To understand how that happened, and how that led to the confounding resurgence of Apple later in his career, you have to consider the full range of personal contradictions Steve brought to the Garden of Allah that December afternoon.

  STEVEN PAUL JOBS felt deeply entitled almost from the start, thanks to parents who raised him to think that he was every bit as special as they believed he could be. Born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, Steve was given up for adoption by his birth mother, Joanna Schieble, who as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison had become romantically involved in 1954 with Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian PhD candidate studying political science. Schieble moved to San Francisco after becoming pregnant, but Jandali remained in Wisconsin. Paul and Clara Jobs, a childless working-class couple, adopted Steve just a few days after his birth. When Steve was five years old they moved to Mountain View, twenty-five miles south of the city, and soon thereafter adopted a daughter they named Patty. While some have trotted out Steve’s adoption as a primal “rejection” that explains the irascible behavior he often displayed, especially early in his career, Steve repeatedly told me that he had been loved and deeply indulged by Paul and Clara. “He felt he had been really blessed by having the two of them as parents,” says Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve’s widow.

  Neither Paul nor Clara had attended college, but they did promise Schieble that they would send their new son. It was a significant pledge for a lower-middle-class family, and it marked the beginning of their pattern of giving their only son whatever he needed. Steve was whip smart; he skipped sixth grade, and his teachers even considered having him skip two grades. After leapfrogging to seventh grade, however, Steve felt snubbed socially and still unchallenged by his schoolwork. He pleaded with his parents to move him into a better school, and they agreed, despite the considerable cost of the switch. Paul and Clara packed up and relocated to Los Altos, a prosperous bedroom community that had sprung up in what were once plum orchards adjoining the low hills rising to the west above San Francisco Bay. The new neighborhood was then a subdivision within the Cupertino-Sunnyvale school district, one of the best in California. Once there, Steve started to flourish.

  Paul and Clara may have let his sense of entitlement blossom, but they also nurtured his perfectionism, especially when it came to the rigor that underlies great craftsmanship. Paul Jobs held many jobs over his lifetime, including repo man, machinist, and car mechanic. He was at heart an inveterate tinkerer and craftsman who made furniture or rebuilt cars most weekends and taught his son the paramount value of taking one’s time, paying attention to details, and—since Paul was anything but rich—putting in the legwork to hunt for spare parts that were a good value. “He had a workbench out in his garage,” Steve once told an interviewer from the Smithsonian Institution. “When I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said ‘Steve, this is your workbench now.’ And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me … teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.” In his later years, as Steve would show me a new iPod or a new laptop, he would remember how his father told him that you had to devote as much care to the underside of a cabinet as to the finish, or to the brake pads of a Chevy Impala as to the paint job. Steve had a deeply sentimental streak, and it came out when he told these stories about his father. They were made more poignant by the fact that Steve gave his father so much credit for instilling his own sense of aesthetic excellence in a medium—digital electronics—that Paul Jobs would never fully understand.

  That combination, of believing that he was special and of wanting to get things just right, was a potent mix given where and when he was raised. The experience of growing up in what wasn’t yet even called Silicon Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s was unique. The environs between Palo Alto and San Jose were a boomtown of a new kind, attracting highly educated electrical engineers, chemists, optical specialists, computer programmers, and physicists who were drawn to the region’s blossoming semiconductor, telecommunications, and electronics companies. It was a time when the market for high-end electronics had shifted from government and military customers to corporate and industrial America, expanding dramatically the number of potential customers for new electronic technologies of all kinds. The fathers of many other kids in Steve’s neighborhood were engineers who commuted to work at the nearby headquarters of emerging tech giants like Lockheed, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Applied Materials.

  Living there, a curious child interested in math and science could easily develop a much deeper sense of the leading edge of technology than those growing up elsewhere in the country. Electronics were just beginning to replace hot rods as the passion of young tinkerers. Geeks lived and breathed the fumes emanating from their soldering irons, and traded dog-eared copies of Popular Science and Popular Electronics magazines. They built their own transistor radios, hi-fi stereo systems, ham radios, oscilloscopes, rockets, lasers, and Tesla coils from kits offered by mail order companies like Edmund Scientific, Heathkit, Estes Industries, and Radio Shack. In Silicon Valley, electronics wasn’t just a hobby. It was a fast-growing new industry and just as excitin
g as rock and roll.

  For precocious kids like Steve, the implicit promise in all this was that anything could be figured out—and since anything could be figured out, anything could be built. “It gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe,” he once told me. “These things were not mysteries anymore. You looked at a television set and you would think that, ‘I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build that.’ Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment and that one had no knowledge of their interiors.”

  He joined the Explorers Club, a group of fifteen kids who met regularly on Hewlett-Packard’s campus in Palo Alto to work on electronics projects and get lessons from HP engineers. This is where Steve was first exposed to computers. It’s also what gave him the outlandish notion to reach out and establish a minor, but fascinating, connection with one of the two men who famously created HP, the first Silicon Valley dynamo out of a garage. When he was fourteen years old, he called up Bill Hewlett at his Palo Alto home to ask personally for some hard-to-find electronic components for an Explorers Club project. He got them, in part, because he already could spin a good tale. In many ways, Steve was a prototypical adolescent geek. But he also was a curious student of the humanities, beguiled by the words of Shakespeare, Melville, and Bob Dylan. Glib and persuasive with his parents, he applied the same skills when dealing with friends, teachers, mentors, and eventually the rich and powerful; Steve innately understood from an early age that the right words and stories could help him win the attention he needed to get what he wanted.