Review of “Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different”

This book is a quick, easy read. It’s quite dense with information, conveying a lot about Jobs life in a small space. The positive aspects of its brevity were that I got a good overview of the man and of his life, I found some terrific inspiration quotes and insights, and I was able to read the book very quickly.

The drawback to its brevity is that it didn’t go as deeply into Jobs’ mind and motivations as I would have liked. This, I think, is a purely personal preference, and I don’t mention it as a failing in the book, but rather something left unsatisfied to my personal tastes.

People are fascinating, and Jobs is exceptionally so. I’d like to read a long, in-depth examination of the man and of his mind, of his experiences with meditation and spirituality, and his perspective on LSD.

However, the drawback of the books’ brevity does not count against the general quality of the book. I would give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.

The book was very balanced in that it didn’t shy away from the less likeable aspects of Jobs personality, which I found admirable because Jobs is still a celebrity, almost a cult figure of the modern age, and it would have been very easy to post a puff piece doing nothing but aggrandizing the man.

This book, like all honest accounts of a life as impactful as Jobs’ was, raises many points of interest in the debate over the “great man theory” of history. Jobs was clearly brilliant and fueled by a passion few could understand, but he also got quite a lot of help by people and circumstances along the way. Who knows where an arrest for his earliest forays into entrepreneurialism would have led him? Who can say how limited he would have been without the practical know-now and dedicated of Woz?

But, more than anything, I finished this book feeling inspired. Jobs was smart, without a doubt, but so were lots of people around him. What pushed him to such incredible success was his single-minded devotion to his goal. A person can’t help the level of intelligence they’re born with, but they can uncover the fire in their own soul that will give them a similar driving passion. And, with that force operating within us, who knows how high any of us can fly?