A titan of technological innovation, Steve Jobs thought differently than everyone else. He had the mercurial ability to know what people wanted before they knew it themselves, and what's more, he knew how to sell that idea. An advocator of good design in both function as well as appearance, his influence in Silicone Valley changed the way the world thinks about technology. But how did he achieve such success? What were his methods? How to Think Like Steve Jobs reveals the philosophies and carefully honed skills Jobs used in his journey to the top and in the consolidation of Apple's unique place in the public consciousness. With his thoughts on innovation, how to find inspiration, presenting an idea, advertising, and much more, you can delve into the mind of the master.
A titan of technological innovation, Steve Jobs thought differently than everyone else. He had the mercurial ability to know what people wanted before they knew it themselves, and what's more, he knew how to sell that idea. An advocator of good design in both function as well as appearance, his influence in Silicone Valley changed the way the world thinks about technology. But how did he achieve such success? What were his methods? How to Think Like Steve Jobs reveals the philosophies and carefully honed skills Jobs used in his journey to the top and in the consolidation of Apple's unique place in the public consciousness. With his thoughts on innovation, how to find inspiration, presenting an idea, advertising, and much more, you can delve into the mind of the master.
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Overview
A titan of technological innovation, Steve Jobs thought differently than everyone else. He had the mercurial ability to know what people wanted before they knew it themselves, and what's more, he knew how to sell that idea. An advocator of good design in both function as well as appearance, his influence in Silicone Valley changed the way the world thinks about technology. But how did he achieve such success? What were his methods? How to Think Like Steve Jobs reveals the philosophies and carefully honed skills Jobs used in his journey to the top and in the consolidation of Apple's unique place in the public consciousness. With his thoughts on innovation, how to find inspiration, presenting an idea, advertising, and much more, you can delve into the mind of the master.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782430681 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michael O'Mara Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2014 |
| Series: | How To Think Like series |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How to Think Like Steve Jobs
By Daniel Smith
Michael O'Mara Books Limited
Copyright © 2013 Michael O'Mara Books LimitedAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78243-188-6
CHAPTER 1
Be an Outsider
'I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight.'
STEVE JOBS
For a man who attained enormous wealth and stood astride the corporate world, Steve Jobs did a remarkably good job to avoid becoming just another rich, white, middle-aged man in a suit and tie. He had an uncanny knack of persuading his customers that they were not merely filling the coffers of a huge multinational. Instead, he persuaded us that, by buying Apple, we were taking a step towards asserting our own individuality and creativity. The message seemed to be: Join Team Jobs and join an army of outsiders breaking down walls.
So how did he do it? Quite simply, because Steve Jobs truly believed that an outsider was just what he was.
A bumpy start
From the moment of his birth on 24 February 1955, Steve Jobs found himself cut adrift from the path of normality. His Syrian-born father, John Jandali, and his fresh-faced mother, Joanne Schieble, were both students. Joanne's father was far from impressed with her romantic dalliances and so it was that her new baby was immediately put up for adoption – only for the intended adoptive parents to pull out of the undertaking. Steve thus came to be taken in by Clara and Paul Jobs, a sweet couple of limited means but with a vast wealth of love to give.
A stroke of luck
If Steve had had a bumpy start to life, finding himself with the Jobs was his first great stroke of luck. They were intent on doing what was best for their young charge, notably planning for his college future despite neither of them having benefitted from such an opportunity themselves. As well as scrimping and saving to set up a college fund, Paul Jobs also passed on to Steve a serious passion for gadgets, gizmos and machines of all types. An avid car fan, Paul spent much of his spare time fixing up old vehicles and then selling them on. When Steve was old enough his father began to educate him in the skills required to take a machine apart and put it back together again, little knowing how invaluable this would prove.
Education
Steve's domestic life was relatively stable but he cultivated his outsider status away from home. Though a bright spark, he consistently had disciplinary problems at school. On one occasion, for instance, he planned to unfurl for a graduating class a banner – which he had helpfully signed – bearing a not-entirely-complementary hand signal. As he hit puberty his sense of not belonging only increased, and he evolved into a straggly-haired and angsty teen – a not uncommon phenomenon but one which Steve carried with him into his college years.
Having stretched his parents' resources to the extreme in order to get a place at Reed College in Portland, Oregon – a school renowned for its liberal arts syllabus – he gained a reputation among fellow students as something of a campus freak. He threw himself into the counterculture that took hold of American society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, experimenting with drugs, exploring his spiritual side and spending time working on what was effectively a communal apple orchard. He ultimately dropped out of college.
Experimentation
Jobs read books on diet that inspired him to follow a fruitarian regime – a form of extreme veganism that allows for a menu consisting only of fruits, nuts, seeds and so on. Prone to a certain level of food faddism throughout his life – he would later self-effacingly tell his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that 'I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight' – he spent periods eating only one particular type of food, such as apples or carrots. At other times he went in for purging and also for fasting.
Jobs even believed that his diet helped keep his body odour at bay, but alas it did not – a fact that his work colleagues would have to bring to his attention in the early stages of his career.
The corporate ladder
Even when he entered corporate life at Atari, Jobs remained a law unto himself. Apart from the malodorous atmosphere he often left behind, he also refused to groom his long locks and was initially in the habit of wandering around the office in the most casual attire and usually with bare feet. Indeed, he later cost Apple at least one early investment deal when he turned up for a meeting and promptly put his uncovered extremities up on the desk of the man he was there to talk turkey with. He also cultivated a taste for ad hoc foot spas, which involved sticking his feet in the toilet pan and pulling the flush.
So the reason that Jobs could portray himself as apart from 'the Man' was because he was just that. Until his dying day, he retained a heartfelt belief that he was on the outside and it was from this position that he was able to develop his unique view of things. It is not necessary to gorge on berries or dodge deodorant to qualify as an outsider, but in a world where the pressure is generally on to fit in with the crowd, Jobs' life offers an object lesson in the advantages of embracing your outsider status.
CHAPTER 2Follow Your Own Road
'Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.'
STEVE JOBS
His sense of standing apart from the mainstream resulted in Jobs developing a bespoke life philosophy of his own. While some of the eccentricities of his youth (and, in a few instances, of later life, too) can appear to the onlooker as wilfully outré and even a little self-indulgent, his willingness to embrace new and countercultural ideas would stand him in good stead throughout his professional life. His sense of outsider-dom allowed him the space to think freely and unconventionally.
Jobs' choice of Reed College was telling. Not for him the path many of his contemporaries took into the University of California or to a cheaper public college. Despite the strain it put upon his parents' finances – parents, let us remember, who had vowed to see him into college – he was determined to attend Reed with its reputation for free-wheelers and independent thinkers.
There he set about trying to discern just who he was. He began dabbling in the mind-altering drug LSD, something he would later say was one of the defining experiences of his life. He sat around with his friends, trying to get at the 'truth of life' and evolving into a classic anti-Vietnam War, Dylan-loving hippie with a taste for books from the 'Mind, Body, Spirit' genre, especially anything claiming to reveal the secrets of Zen Buddhism.
Perhaps predictably, this lifestyle took its toll on Jobs' grades and he dropped out at the end of his first semester. It must have been hard on his parents and surely picked at the self-confidence of Jobs, who had asked so much of them in order to attend in the first place. It would prove to be an important step along his journey into adulthood, however, as was his next escapade: a backpacking trip around India.
The trip, a large part of which he undertook with a college friend, proved a true rite of passage. Jobs cut off his hair, found himself afflicted with severe stomach problems, met a guru or two and had an absolute whale of a time. After a few months he returned to California. He may not have 'found himself' but the intensity of the experience reinforced ideas widely explored in the Zen Buddhism literature that he had been reading; in Jobs' own words, he learned 'the power of intuition and experiential wisdom'. That is to say, in accordance with Zen teaching, he increasingly valued personal experience over intellectual understanding.
This willingness to follow his gut feeling when others might rationally have chosen another path would be instrumental in setting him apart in the competitive technology market in years to come.
'Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.'
BARACK OBAMA
CHAPTER 3HOW TO READ LIKE STEVE JOBS
A peek at Jobs' bookshelf provides significant insight into his inspirations and personal philosophy. He was certainly a broad reader. Plato, for instance, was a lifelong favourite, Jobs perhaps attracted to one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy by his shared passion for both the arts and the sciences.
Other classics included William Shakespeare's King Lear, which offers a vivid depiction of what can go wrong if you lose your grip on your empire, a story surely fascinating to any aspiring CEO. He was also a fan of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, arguably the greatest examination of the human soul in American literature. The poetry of Dylan Thomas, meanwhile, drew him in with its striking new forms and unerringly popular touch. He may also have enjoyed Thomas's reputation for rambunctiousness earned the hard way over a series of literary tours in the United States.
Here are a selection of other key works Jobs is known to have read:
* Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé (1971). A multi-million seller that encouraged readers to develop a diet good for the individual and the planet. It inspired Jobs to give up meat.
* Be Here Now by Richard Alpert (1971). A staple of the hippie movement, even inspiring a song of the same name by George Harrison. Ram Dass (as Alpert became known) expands on his theories regarding spirituality, meditation and yoga.
* Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (1946). Details the Indian-born author's spiritual adventures across a life divided between spells in the East and the West. Jobs is said to have read the book – designated one of the 100 most important spiritual books of the twentieth century in a poll conducted by publishers HarperCollins – once a year after first coming across it as a teenager.
* Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind by Dr Richard Maurice Bucke (1901). A classic introduction to the subject of cosmic consciousness, based on the author's own mystical experience in the 1870s. He argues for the universe as a living presence rather than merely inert matter, as well as looking at the consciousness of animals and of humanity in general.
* Meditation in Action by Chögyam Trungpa (1969). A guide for both newcomers and experienced practitioners of Buddhist meditation by a Tibetan master. He explains how the states classically associated with meditation (clarity, discipline, energy, generosity, patience and wisdom) can equip the individual to deal with the tests of life.
* Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa (1973). Based on a series of lectures given by Trungpa in 1970 and 1971, investigating how the conscious pursuit of spiritualism actually negates true self-knowledge.
* The Mucusless Diet Healing System: Scientific Method of Eating Your Way to Health by Arnold Ehret (1922). A guide that claims to show how diet impacts on health, even to the extent of curing diseases previously labelled incurable. Ehret recommends a diet of 'mucusless foods', namely fruit, herbs and starchless vegetables. It profoundly influenced Jobs' own patterns of food consumption.
* Rational Fasting by Arnold Ehret (1926). A further work encouraging a gradual transition to the type of diet outlined in the above title.
* The Whole Earth Catalog, a periodical published by Stewart Brand, principally between 1968 and 1972 (though editions did come out sporadically up to 1998). It provided information for disciples of the counterculture on where to find tools and skills. Jobs described it as 'one of the bibles of my generation' and 'sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along'. One tagline from the final edition stayed with Jobs in particular: 'Stay hungry, stay foolish.'
* Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (1970). A compilation of teachings by a Zen monk who ran a spiritual centre in Los Altos. Encouraging a move away from intellectualism, it is now widely considered a classic of the genre.
CHAPTER 4Meet the Right People
'Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10.30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.'
STEVE JOBS
Be in the right place at the right time
When it came to pursuing his career, Jobs had the benefit of being in the right place at the right time, having grown up in California's Santa Clara Valley. By the 1970s the area had come to be known as Silicon Valley on account of the large number of tech companies that had set up business there in the preceding decades. (The name derives from the silicon transistor vital to the modern microprocessor.) Many of these businesses had strong links to Stanford, the Ivy League university situated in the vicinity. As Timothy J. Sturgeon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in 2000: 'Perhaps the strongest thread that runs through the Valley's past and present is the drive to "play" with novel technology, which, when bolstered by an advanced engineering degree and channelled by astute management, has done much to create the industrial powerhouse we see in the Valley today.'
If Steve Jobs had not happened to be there already, it seems likely that he would have found his way to Silicon Valley of his own accord. That said, while being in the Valley at that particular moment in history was certainly serendipitous for Jobs, it was still beholden upon him to take advantage of the situation. Simply being in the Valley was no more a guarantee of success in the technology arena than being in Hollywood is a guarantee of an Oscar.
Find friends on the same wavelength
Crucially, from a young age Jobs attracted likeminded individuals who would help him develop his interests, skills and ideas. At high school he became great friends with Bill Fernandez, the two of them wiling away hours talking over the big questions of life and undertaking science projects together. Fernandez would go on to join Apple in its very early days but will be most notable to future historians as the person who introduced Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Wozniak, a bona fide technology geek, was in the early 1970s dreaming up plans for his own computer: reading manuals, making drawings, building circuit boards. Like Jobs, he learned by doing and didn't mind making some mistakes along the way. The two, though very different in certain fundamental respects, were – it now goes without saying – a great fit, each inspiring the other to new heights. But more of that later.
At university Jobs made still more friends who would come to play a role in the Apple story, most notably Daniel Kottke. The two not only buddied up during Jobs' brief stint at Reed but also shared the experience of that character-defining trip around India. Kottke, like Fernandez, would become one of the earliest employees of Apple a few years later.
Ask questions
Another important early influence on Jobs was an employee of Hewlett-Packard, a long-established technology giant in the Valley. One of the company's engineers, Larry Lang, lived a few doors up the road from young Steve and he took the lad under his wing, acting as an early mentor and nurturing his love of all things technical.
Among other things, Lang introduced Jobs to the wonders of Heathkits, self-assembly technology kits that had been produced by the Heath Company of Michigan since 1947. For enthusiasts intent on building their own TV receiver or clock radio or even hobbyist computer, the kits demystified the world of resistors, capacitors, vacuum tubes and transformers. For an enquiring young mind they represented a veritable cornucopia of possibilities. When Jobs was a little older, Lang also introduced him into the Hewlett-Packard Explorers' Club, which met weekly to hear talks by engineers. It was at one of these events that the twelve-year-old Jobs first set eyes on a prototype home computer.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Think Like Steve Jobs by Daniel Smith. Copyright © 2013 Michael O'Mara Books Limited. Excerpted by permission of Michael O'Mara Books Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Timeline of a Remarkable Life,
I. GET TO THE TOP,
Be an Outsider,
Follow Your Own Road,
How to Read Like Steve Jobs,
Meet the Right People,
The Wizardy Woz,
Mine Your Life Experience,
Be a Survivor,
Keep Your Powder Dry,
Seize Opportunity,
Jobs' Heroes,
Never Stand Still,
Dream Big,
A Tale of Five Companies,
Cultivate Your Brand,
How Apple Got Its Name,
II. STAY AT THE TOP,
Build Beautiful,
Look Around for Inspiration,
Job Interviews the Jobs Way,
Build a Winning Team,
How Not to Manage Relationships,
Master the Money (So it Doesn't Master You),
Don't Sideline Design,
How to Create an Instant Design Classic,
Sell the Dream,
Think Different,
Build a Community of Customers,
Go for the Big Bang,
The Steve Jobs Uniform,
Find a Dragon to Slay,
Jobs vs Gates,
Roll with the Punches,
Turn Adversity into Advantage,
Know When to Tear Up the Blueprints,
Outpace the Curve,
How to Load Your iPod Like Steve,
Create the Space for Creativity,
Building a Home,
Know Your Customers (But Not Too Well),
Reimagine the Marketplace,
Jobs' Patents,
Establish a Work–Life Balance,
Luxuriate the Steve Jobs Way,
Steve Jobs: Imagining a Future without Himself,
Acknowledgements,