Transcript
Introduction
He shaped how I came to view the world. We were real strong-minded, but he had a fully formed aesthetic and I did not. It is hard enough to see what is already there, to remove the many impediments to a clear view of reality. But Steve's gift was even greater. He saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, and what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions born of a true inner freedom. For this reason, he possessed an uncannily large sense of possibility. An epic sense of possibility. Steve's love of beauty and his impatience with ugliness pervaded our lives. No object was too small or insignificant to be exempt from Steve's examination of the meaning and the quality of its form. He looked at things and then created things from the standpoint of perfection. That could be an unforgiving standpoint, but over time I came to see its reasons, to understand Steve's unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuous on himself. He was the most unfettered thinker I have ever known.
That was Steve's wife speaking at his memorial service after he passed away and is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Becoming Steve Jobs, The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader, and it was written by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. This is the second time I read this book. I originally read it several years ago. It was episode 19 of Founders. At the time I first read this book though, I had only read two books about Steve Jobs, so I didn't really have an advanced understanding of who he was and why his career is so important for future generations of entrepreneurs to study. Since then, I've read over 10 books on Steve Jobs, many of them multiple times, and then I tracked down every single biography I could find about the people that he discussed, whether heroes or influences or people he studied when he was building Apple. I made episodes about every single one of those books. I'm going to include it in the show notes. You can also go to founderspodcast.com and you'll find it there. It's about 40 different episodes.