Becoming Steve Jobs
How a dropout became visionary
Description
In September 1985, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple, the company he had cofounded in a garage nine years earlier. He was thirty years old. He had lost a boardroom fight to John Sculley, the executive he himself had recruited from Pepsi, and he left convinced the world had misread him. He sold nearly all his Apple stock, kept a single share, and walked out to start over. The press treated it as the fall of a wunderkind who had flown too close to the sun — brilliant, yes, but reckless, arrogant, impossible to work with. For most of the next decade, the story held. The venture he started next lost money for years. The animation studio he bought looked like an expensive hobby.
And then the ending everyone knows: Jobs returns to a nearly bankrupt Apple in 1997, and over the following fourteen years builds the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and turns the company into the most valuable in the world. The temptation is to read that arc as vindication — the misunderstood genius was right all along. Brent Schlender, a journalist who knew Jobs across twenty-five years and dozens of long conversations, thinks that reading is lazy. It skips the only part that actually matters.
Schlender's biography, written with Rick Tetzeli, sets itself against the caricature that hardened after Jobs died in 2011: half-genius, half-jerk, the same volatile character from start to finish. That version, the book argues, cannot explain the second act at all. If Jobs never changed, why did the exile matter? The claim here is that the wilderness years remade him — and that the man who came back was not the boy who left.
The question we’re asking : How does a founder reckless enough to be pushed out of his own company become the most effective business visionary of his generation?What we’ll see : The rise, the fall, the long detour that reshaped him, and why the honest version of the story is about change rather than genius.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The wonder boy who wrecked his own company
Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after one semester in 1972, though he lingered on campus auditing the classes that interested him — famously a calligraphy course whose typefaces would surface, years later, in the Macintosh. He was adopted, intense, drawn to Eastern spirituality and psychedelics, and he had a knack for talking people into things they had thought impossible. In 1976, with the engineer Steve Wozniak, he started Apple. Wozniak built the machines; Jobs understood, before almost anyone, that a computer could be a consumer product rather than a hobbyist's kit.
The young Jobs Schlender describes is genuinely gifted and genuinely difficult. He divided the world into geniuses and idiots, sometimes reclassifying the same person within a single conversation. He took credit that belonged to others, wept when things went wrong, parked in handicapped spaces, and berated engineers until they either quit or produced something extraordinary. On the Macintosh team he inspired ferocious loyalty and ferocious burnout in roughly equal measure. He was, in the book's telling, a young man who confused being right about products with being right about everything.
02Chapter 2 — Ten years in the wilderness
Most tellings of Jobs's life treat the years between 1985 and 1997 as an intermission — the boring stretch before the good part. Schlender argues the opposite: this is where the whole story actually happens. Jobs founded NeXT, a company that built beautiful, expensive workstations for higher education and research. It was, commercially, close to a disaster. The hardware never found a market, the factory he built was a monument to perfectionism, and the money bled for years. NeXT taught Jobs, slowly and painfully, what it costs to be wrong.
The second bet looked even stranger at the time. In 1986 he paid roughly ten million dollars for the computer-graphics division that George Lucas was spinning off, and renamed it Pixar. For most of a decade it, too, lost money, surviving as a maker of animation software and pricey rendering hardware while its real talent — John Lasseter and a small crew of artists — kept trying to tell stories. Jobs kept writing checks, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes out of stubborn faith.
03Chapter 3 — The man who came back different
When Apple bought NeXT in late 1996 for around four hundred million dollars, it was ostensibly acquiring an operating system to replace its own aging software. What it actually got was Jobs. The company was months from insolvency, its product line a sprawl of confusing models, its board exhausted. Within a year Jobs was running it, and the first thing the returning founder did was not launch a visionary product. He killed things. He cut the product line to a handful of clear choices and drew a famous two-by-two grid on a whiteboard — consumer and pro, desktop and portable — and told the company that everything had to fit in one of four boxes.
That instinct for subtraction was the discipline the young Jobs had lacked. The book's point is that focus of this kind is not a personality trait; it is a learned skill, and Jobs had learned it the hard way at NeXT, watching a great product fail because it tried to be everything. He also learned to build a team he trusted and kept: the designer Jony Ive, the operations savant Tim Cook who could run the machine Jobs never wanted to run himself, a marketing partner in Lee Clow. The lone genius had become, of all things, a manager of talent.
04Chapter 4 — What growth actually looks like
The larger argument of the book is quieter than its subject, and it is about how we tell stories about people. We like our founders fixed — born geniuses or born tyrants, the character set at the start and merely revealed by events. It makes a cleaner narrative, and after Jobs died the cleanest narrative won: the difficult genius who was right about everything, whose cruelty was simply the price of his vision. Schlender, who had a quarter-century of unguarded conversations to draw on, found that version both flattering and false, and false in a way that costs us something.
What it costs us is the actual lesson. If Jobs was always the man of 2007, then the exile was a detour and the wilderness years were dead time, and there is nothing to learn except that you should trust geniuses even when they are behaving badly. But if the man of 2007 was made — sanded down by a failed company, taught patience by a business he did not understand, changed by fatherhood and by ten years of being demonstrably wrong — then the story becomes something rarer in Silicon Valley mythology. It becomes a story about someone who was capable of change.
05Conclusion
In October 2011, Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at fifty-six, less than a year after the iPad's launch and at the peak of Apple's ascent. The single share he had kept in 1985 had become, by way of a four-hundred-million-dollar acquisition, a return to the company, and fourteen years of relentless work, a stake in the most valuable business on earth. The wonder boy who had been shown the door came back and closed the loop himself — but not, Schlender insists, as the same person who walked out.
