Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

“Before, if you asked Steve for a favor, he might do the exact opposite,” Hertzfeld said. “That was the perversity in his nature. Now he actually tries to be helpful.”

Bewkes respected Jobs’s ability to be both a strategic thinker and a master of the tiniest details. “Steve can go readily from the overarching principles into the details,” he said.

Some media observers were incredulous. “In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers,”

“The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial.”

He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future.

With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world’s most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.

Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

“His mind was never a captive of reality,” Laurene said. “He possessed an epic sense of possibility. He looked at things from the standpoint of perfection.”

“While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”