Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  In hindsight, it’s clear that seeing Christie and Ording’s multitouch demo was an epiphany for Steve, one that was not all that different from his first visit to Xerox PARC twenty-five years earlier. Helping people interact more directly and intuitively with intelligent devices was the central factor in creating a new genre of smart mobile gadgets. The Mac had been a radical new conception of the user interface for a computer, and the iPod’s thumb-wheel had been a user interface breakthrough as well. Multi-touch had the same potential as the Mac’s GUI. But he’d have to move quickly.

  Thanks to the iPod, Steve knew that his team could strike fast. And also because of the iPod experience, he knew that Apple could make mind-boggling quantities of whatever device it created. So he decided that Apple was going to create a cellphone. The company was going to put in the palm of your hand a gadget as slick and compact as an iPod, that could download or play music and even video streamed directly over a wireless network, that would be a great phone with amazing voice-mail and directory features, and that would be a computer as powerful as the engineering workstations he’d built at NeXT. Most people hated their cellphones, he liked to say. Apple would create one they would love.

  All this decision making took place in late January 2005. It was hardly the only big thing going on Apple—after all, at MacWorld Steve had unveiled the Mac Mini computer, the iPod Shuffle, and a new suite of personal productivity applications called iWork, which he hoped would compete directly with Microsoft Office. But the cellphone project quickly became the main topic of discussion when he and Jony met, as they did almost every day now. They would have lunch together three or four times a week, and take long walks afterward kicking around ideas for solving such mundane-sounding problems as how to keep a touch screen from reacting to contact with your ear when you are talking on the phone, or which materials to use so that your screen wouldn’t get all scuffed when sitting in your pocket alongside keys and loose change. Steve would sometimes go back to Jony’s design lab and sit there for hours, watching designers tinker with prototypes, or else the two of them would stand together at the whiteboard, drawing and modifying each other’s design ideas. They were two kindred spirits, and Steve would now collaborate more closely with Jony than he ever had with Woz or Avie or Ruby or even Ed Catmull and John Lasseter.

  As he brainstormed with Jony, and as Fadell’s team started to get going on a real design, Steve became increasingly confident. Creating a wholly new kind of mobile phone wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it would turn out to be even more daunting than the original Macintosh project. But Steve was certain he could negotiate a good deal with a telephone company, now that he’d gained some experience from the ROKR deal. He felt sure that his team could master the software and engineering challenges. He began to have the sense that if it all panned out, this new gadget might be the biggest-selling electronic product of all time. It wasn’t just going to be a phone, nor was it going to be a phone that was a media player. It was going to be a full-blown computer, too. That meant it would also be a smartphone, one that was perpetually connected to the Internet. The easiest part was coming up with a name for it: iPhone, of course.

  Chapter 13

  Stanford

  On the morning of June 16, 2005, Steve woke up with butterflies in his stomach. In fact, says Laurene, “I’d almost never seen him more nervous.”

  Steve was a natural performer who elevated business presentations to something close to high art. But what made him fidgety this day was the prospect of addressing the Stanford University graduating class of 2005. University president John Hennessy had broached the idea several months earlier, and after taking just a little time to think it over, Steve had said yes. He was offered speaking engagements constantly, and he always said no. In fact, he was asked to do so many commencement addresses that it became a running joke with Laurene and other friends who had college or graduate degrees: Steve said he’d accept one just to make an end run around them and get his PhD in a day, versus the years and years it had taken them. But in the end, saying no was simply a question of return on investment—conferences and public speaking seemed to offer a meager payoff compared to other things, like a dazzling MacWorld presentation, working on a great product, or being around his family. “If you look closely at how he spent his time,” says Tim Cook, “you’ll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attend. He wanted to be home for dinner.”

  Stanford was different, even though speaking there would not turn Steve into Dr. Jobs—the school did not offer honorary degrees. For starters, he wouldn’t have to travel or miss dinner, since it was possible for him to drive from his house to the university in just seven minutes. More important, the university was deeply tied into the Silicon Valley tech community in a way he admired. Its education was first-rate and the professors he’d met through the years, like Jim Collins, were top caliber. Despite being a dropout, he always enjoyed spending time around smart college students. “He was only going to do one commencement speech,” says Laurene, “and if it was going to be anywhere it was going to be at Stanford.”

  Getting around to writing the speech proved to be something of a bother. Steve had talked to a few friends about what to say, and he had even asked the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for some thoughts. But nothing came of all that, so finally he decided to write it himself. He wrote up a draft one night, and then started bouncing ideas off Laurene, Tim Cook, and a couple of others. “He really wanted to get it right,” says Laurene. “He wanted it to say something he really cared about.” The language changed slightly, but its structure, which summed up his essential values in three vignettes, remained the same. In the days before the event he would recite it while walking around the house, from the bedroom upstairs to the kitchen below, the kids watching their dad spring past them in the same kind of trance he’d sometimes enter in the days before MacWorld or Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Several times he read it to the whole family at dinner.

  That Sunday morning, as the family got ready to leave for Stanford Stadium, Steve spent some time looking for his keys to the SUV, which he couldn’t find anywhere, but then he decided he didn’t want to drive anyway—he’d use the short ride to rehearse once more. By the time the family piled into the SUV, they were late. Laurene drove as Steve tweaked the text yet again. Steve was sitting shotgun, with Erin, Eve, and Reed piled into the backseat. As they made their way toward the campus, Steve and Laurene fumbled through their pockets and Laurene’s handbag, looking for the VIP parking pass they’d been sent. They couldn’t find it anywhere.

  As they neared Stanford, it became apparent that they should have built in more time—twenty-three thousand people were descending on the stadium that morning. The stadium is usually easy to get to, since it sits just off El Camino Real, but many roads were blocked off to accommodate the heavy pedestrian traffic of graduates and their families. When they finally got into the eucalyptus grove on the outskirts of the campus that doubled as a parking lot for the stadium, Laurene had to navigate around one roadblock after another. Steve was getting tense—he thought he might miss the only graduation speech he’d ever agreed to give.

  Finally the family arrived at what seemed to be the last roadblock before the stadium. A policewoman standing by the sawhorse waved at Laurene to stop. She walked slowly over to the driver’s side of the car.

  “You can’t go this way, ma’am,” she said. “There’s no parking here. You’ll have to go back to Paly [Palo Alto High School], across El Camino. That’s where the overflow lot is.”

  “No, no, no,” Laurene said. “We have a parking pass. We just lost it.”

  The policewoman stared at her.

  “You don’t understand,” Laurene explained. “I have the commencement speaker here. He’s right here in the car. Really!”

  The officer dipped her head and looked in through Laurene’s window. She saw the three kids in the back, the elegant blond driver, and a
man in the shotgun seat wearing tattered jeans, Birkenstocks, and an old black T-shirt. He was fiddling with a few pieces of paper in his lap as he looked up at her through his rimless glasses. The officer stepped back and folded her arms.

  “Really?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Which one?”

  Everyone in the car broke out laughing. “Really,” said Steve, raising his hand. “It’s me.”

  WHEN THEY FINALLY reached the stadium, Steve, who had donned a cap and gown, headed for the dais with President Hennessy, while Laurene and the kids accompanied his daughters to a luxury booth above the football field. The scene was the typical Stanford mix of solemnity and frivolity. Some students marched around dressed in wigs and Speedos, participating in what’s known as the “wacky walk,” while others simply sported the regular graduation gowns. A handful dressed up as iPods. Hennessy spent a few minutes introducing Steve. He spoke of Steve as a college dropout who, ironically, could serve as a model of the kind of broad thinking needed to change the world for the better. The students were thrilled with Hennessy’s choice of commencement speaker. Steve seemed so much more accessible than the stuffed shirts who typically address graduating classes. After he tucked away his bottled water in a shelf under the speaker’s podium, Steve launched into the fifteen-minute speech that would become the most-quoted commencement address of all time:

  I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

  The first story is about connecting the dots.

  I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

  It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

  And seventeen years later I did go to college. But I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

  It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

  Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

  None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

  Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

  My second story is about love and loss.

  I was lucky—I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard, and in ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a two-billion-dollar company with over four thousand employees. We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at thirty I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

  I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down—that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

  I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

  During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

  I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work
is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

  My third story is about death.

  When I was seventeen, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

  Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

  About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at seven thirty in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.