Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Steve Jobs

            STEVE JOBS
          by WALTER ISAACSON



This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose
passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies,
music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites.

His life unlike most of us is full of many ups and down believe me he was far more confused than most of us and
he tried new things a lot in his life. He made independent decisions in life which sometime even himself was not
very sure of. To discover about him read this wonderful masterpiece by WALTER ISAACSON.

I am going to site some of the remarkable incidences which would move you to go through the pages on such a
legendary creature.

He was abandoned.
His biological parents disowned him. Some another couple adopted him, and the very fact that he was
abandoned kept him hurting all his through life. At some beginning stage of his life he had made his mind to
make his biological parents feel sorry and regretful for this act.His nature showed a blend of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and detachment.

He was college dropout.
That didn't mean that he was not good at studies or anything like that. He was very bright right from his school.
But, like most of the geniuses he too had some problem with the teaching style of school and all those
memorising and cramming things.
He was intellectually special, when he was in fifth the school made remarkable proposal that he skip two grades
and go right into seventh. Classes seemed boring to him, he would always plan some sort of pranks. His pranks
were very alarming. Once he posted on school notice board that students can bring their pets on annual day for
a competition and the school ground transformed into all disorder with dogs chasing cats , cats chasing
rats ,birds, tortoise and all. Later her teacher discovered that only way to handle him was to keep him busy with
maths problems of higher classes.
He didn't want to join college. But to his parents persistence he finally made his mind, but his decision to join REEDs college was strange. He did not consider state schools, such as Berkeley, nor did he look at Stanford, just
up the road and likely to offer a scholarship. His reasoned “The kids who went to Stanford, they already knew
what they wanted to do and they weren’t really artistic. I wanted something that was more artistic and
interesting.”
Instead he applied only to Reed College, a private liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, that was one of the most
expensive in the nation and was known for its free-spirited hippie lifestyle, which combined somewhat uneasily
with its rigorous academic standards and core curriculum.
There he seldom attended classes , he was into drugs, marijuana, LSD and hash as well. One the other side he
would practice spiritualism, meditation and was deeply influenced by a variety of books on spirituality and
enlightenment, most notably By Here Now, a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba
Ram Dass. Other books including Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, Autobiography of a Yogi by
Paramahansa Yogananda, and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa. During the
summer of 1973, he travelled to India to on spiritual journey meet Ram Dass’s Hindu guru, Neem Karoli Baba,
famously known to his many followers as Maharaj-ji.
He sometimes would follow unusual diets regime. Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet
He sometimes would follow unusual diets regime. Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet
would prevent not just mucus but also body odour, even if he didn’t use deodorant or shower regularly and
people would complain about it. There is a story about Steve turning orange from eating so many carrots his
friends remember him having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue. Job's compulsive search for self-awareness also
led him to undergo primal scream therapy. Later he admitted that through all these soul searching, meditations,primal scream and the mucusless diets, he was trying to cleanse himself and get deeper into his frustration about his birth. He also he was deeply angry and wounded about the fact that he had been given up.

He was great perfectionist.
But since he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, his apartment remained mostly empty,
lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the centre, framed pictures of Einstein
and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor.
You would discover his obsession for perfection especially at a point where his factory was to be designed and
When asked about his obsessive concern over the look of the factory, Jobs said it was a way to ensure a passion
for perfection...

Just read the book to discover more about the great innovator, perfectionist, confused, blunt and genius, intuitive guy who just rocked this world. He was an intersection of science and art.