Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas, and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

  This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

  No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

  Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. 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. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

  When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

  Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

  Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

  Thank you all very much.

  From his earliest days, Steve had always been able to spin a tale. But nothing he ever said before resonated this way. The speech has been viewed at least 35 million times on YouTube. It didn’t go viral, in the way of a Web phenomenon of 2015—social networks weren’t as developed or extensive a decade ago. But it gradually became recognized as something truly exceptional, of great meaning to a world of people beyond the Stanford Stadium as well. Its popularity surprised him. “None of us expected it to take off like that,” says Katie Cotton, who headed up communications and PR for Apple at the time.

  It was not a speech that would have resonated or gotten the same attention a few years earlier. But by the summer of 2005, Apple was back, and Steve’s reputation along with it. Revenues and profits were up, and the stock too was beginning to move in the right direction. All thoughts of the dark days, all memories of Spindler and Sculley and Amelio had been banished, at least for the public—Steve himself always kept those times in the back of his mind, as a reminder of what could happen if Apple didn’t stay sharp. Much of the public found something deeply admirable about what he had accomplished. Steve was no longer a wunderkind and he had put the has-been label to rest. Now he seemed to be a comeback hero, defying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage that “there are no second acts in American life.” The question was no longer whether Apple would survive; the question was, What would Apple do next? Indeed, the cover story I had written for Fortune a few weeks before the speech was titled “How Big Can Apple Get?”

  For Jim Collins, Apple’s comeback is the starting point for considering the nature Steve’s greatness as a businessman. “We all get crushed or decked or knocked down. Everyone does. Sometimes you may not even see that it’s happened, but it happens to everyone,” says Collins, who besides writing several bestsellers in the last ten years has also turned himself into a world-class rock climber. “Whenever I find myself tired, whenever I’m thinking about whether I want to launch into another creative project, I always think of Steve in that period when he was in trouble. I’ve always drawn sustenance from that. That’s a touchstone for me, that willingness not to capitulate.”

  Collins has specialized in the study of what makes great companies tick, and what marks the people who lead them. He sees something unique in Steve’s unorthodox business education. “I used to call him the Beethoven of business,” he says, “but that’s more true of when he was young. When Steve was twenty-two, you could consider him a genius with a thousand helpers. But he grew way beyond that. He’s not a success story, but a growth story. It’s truly remarkable to go from being a great artist to being a great company builder.”

  After the scattered political and emotional frenzy of his first decade at Apple, and after his failure to deliver what he promised at NeXT, it was hard to imagine that Steve could ever be considered a great business leader. But by the summer of 2005, he had begun to seem just that. Clearly, Apple would have simply disappeared without him. Luck had played a big role in getting Steve back to Apple, but, says Collins, echoing Ed Catmull, “What separates people is the return on luck, what you do with it when you get it. What matters is how you play the hand you’re dealt.” He continues, “You don’t leave the game, until it’s not your choice. Steve Jobs had great luck at arriving at the birth of an industry. Then he had bad luck in getting booted out. But Steve played whatever hand he was dealt to the best of his ability. Sometimes you create the hand, by giving yourself challenges that will make you stronger, where you don’t even know what’s next. That’s the beauty of the story. Steve’s almost like the Tom Hanks character in Castaway—just keep breathing because you don’t know what the tide will bring in tomorrow.”

  “The narrative that was created around Steve 1.0 has dominated,” says Collins. “That’s partly because the story of a man who matured slowly into a seasoned leader is less interesting. Learning how to have disposable cash flow, and how to pick the right people, and growing, and rounding off the sharp edges, and not merely acting strange—that’s not as interesting! But all that personality stuff is just the packaging, the window dressing. What’s the truth of your ambition? Do you have the humility to continually grow, to learn from your failures and get back up? Are you utterly relentless for your cause, ferocious for your cause? Can you channel your intensity and intelligence and energy and talents and gifts and ideas outward into something that is bigger and more impactful than you are? That’s what great leadership is about.”

  Part of what makes the Stanford speech so powerful is that it elucidates the very personal, and hard-earned, values Steve brought to his later leadership of Apple. Each of its three stories contains guidance that Steve could only really understand as a mature man. He was always glib, and he perhaps could have said these things as a younger man. But he wouldn’t have really known what they meant.

  You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. The young Steve would have had none of this statement from the story about dropping out of Reed College. In the decade after founding Apple, Steve was hell-bent on shaping the future to his vision. He believed he could connect the dots as he moved forward. Time and again, his engineers found themselves hamstrung trying to fit their work into his sometimes brilliant, sometimes misguided, specifications. That first time around at Apple, and again at NeXT, Steve had been convinced h
e could do just about everything better than the people working around him. But when he returned to Apple, he really did “have to trust that the dots [would] somehow connect.” Again and again during his second act, the specifics of Apple’s next big things arose from unlikely sources. The iMac was concocted from the design of the eMate, a product that Steve killed. The iPod and iTunes were the direct result of Steve’s misguided interest in movie-editing software. Now Apple was developing a phone because five disparate teams knew that they had Steve’s backing to explore widely, and their work had led him to decide against pursuing the product he really wanted to build, a tablet. Steve had grown comfortable with only seeing the connections between the dots after the fact. Maturity, and the extraordinary talents of the team he had built, made that possible.

  Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.… The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.… 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. Steve discovered what he loved to do early in his life. But what gave these words—from the second story in the speech, the section about love and loss—such power in 2005 was the fact that the love he had for his work had survived so much, and resulted in so much. It took lots and lots of time—all those years of struggling at NeXT, of reconfiguring Pixar, of stabilizing Apple—for things to get “better and better.” Now he could speak with the confidence of someone who had worked on relationships—with Laurene, with the executive team at Apple, and even with his first daughter, Lisa. Steve’s struggles, and everything that he had learned as a result, were essential to Apple’s ability to again and again create products that people loved. No other huge company, save Disney perhaps, creates products that engender such emotional responses, even from otherwise skeptical journalists. After one product announcement, the New York Times ran a wrap-up story with the headline “The magic in Apple’s devices? The heart”—and this was three years after Steve’s death. The company, like its boss, had many faults. But it worked with a sense of mission that was different from other companies in its industry.

  Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Without the proof of Apple’s success, these words from the speech’s final chapter could be misread as the kind of callow cheerleading intoned by high school valedictorians. But what gives them strength and power is that they come from someone who had proved their value in a corporate setting. Just as Steve thoroughly deviated from the norm, Apple deviated from the norm of its industry, and in many ways from all of corporate America. Steve had learned how to modulate the potential solipsism of “follow your heart.” Early in his career, “intuition” had meant a shuttered confidence in the inventions of his own brain. There was a stubborn refusal to consider the thoughts of others. By 2005, intuition had come to mean a sense of what to do that grew out of entertaining a world of possibilities. He was confident enough now to listen to his team as well as his own thoughts, and to acknowledge the nature of the world around him—as he had when learning about the movie industry at Pixar, or in evaluating the openings for Apple upon his return to the company—as he moved toward a course of action. Apple didn’t steer toward the iPhone as a result of focus groups or market research. It headed that way because of intuition, but an intuition that was deeper and richer than the selfish preferences of the young man who had founded Apple.

  WHEN I FIRST read the speech online, I remembered an interview I’d conducted with Steve in 1998. We had been talking about the trajectory of his career when, in a rambling aside not unlike the road on the back cover of the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, Steve told me about the impact that the Catalog had had upon him. “I think back to it when I am trying to remind myself of what to do, of what’s the right thing to do.” A few weeks after that interview had been published in Fortune, I received an envelope in the mail. It was from Stewart Brand, and it contained a rare copy of that final issue. “Please give this to Steve next time you see him,” Stewart asked. When I did, a week or two later, Steve was thrilled. He’d remembered the issue for all those years, but had never had the time to locate a copy for himself.

  The end of the Stanford speech focuses on the Catalog’s back-cover motto, “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” but my favorite line about the catalog in Steve’s speech is when he describes it as “idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” This is, in fact, a lovely description of Steve’s companies at their best. He was an empathetic man who wanted these graduates to head off on foolish, hungry pursuits, and who wanted to give them neat tools and great notions as they began their winding journey. Like Jim Collins, I had gotten close enough to Steve to see beyond his harshness and the occasional outright rudeness to the idealist within. Sometimes it was hard to convey this idealism to others, given Steve’s intensity and unpredictably sharp elbows. The Stanford commencement speech gave the world a glimpse of that genuine idealism.

  Chapter 14

  A Safe Haven for Pixar

  On Saturday, March 12, 2005, Bob Iger, then president of the Walt Disney Company, picked up the phone to make a few calls from his home in Bel Air, California. He called his parents, his two grown daughters from his first marriage, and Daniel Burke and Thomas Murphy, his two most important professional mentors. Then he called someone he’d only met a couple of times: Steve Jobs.

  Iger had big news to share: The following day, March 13, Disney would announce that he would become the next CEO of Disney, replacing Michael Eisner. Eisner had been CEO since 1984, and had followed a great first decade with a second one that can only be described as mediocre and turbulent. By the end, he had disappointed shareholders and alienated just about every stakeholder who had a vested interest in the company. One of those was Pixar’s CEO, who disliked Eisner so much that he had publicly announced that the company would find a new distributor once its existing contract with Disney ended in 2006.

  “Steve,” said Iger, “before you read it in the paper tomorrow, I’m calling to let you know I’m going to be named the next CEO of the company. I don’t fully know what that’s going to mean in terms of Disney and Pixar, but I’m calling to tell you I’d like to figure out a way to keep this relationship alive.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Iger had pondered this call for several days. He knew that fixing the mess at Disney Animation was the most crucial task facing him as CEO, and he had already decided that keeping Pixar was the key to any solution. From what he’d heard, Steve thought of him as a mere extension of Eisner—and frankly, Iger, who had always been a good company man, had given him little reason to think otherwise. He’d been quoted in the press defending Disney’s position in the tortuous Pixar negotiations, and he’d never spent any real time with Steve. But now there was this long pause, and Iger was beginning to hope that, just maybe, Steve was conflicted. “Well,” he finally heard from the other end, “I think I owe you the right to prove that you’re different. If you want to come up and talk about that, then that’s what we should do.”

  ONE OF THE most delightful visits of all my years covering Steve occurred early in the summer of 1999, when he invited me to see Pixar’s new headquarters and studio in Emeryville, on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge. The animation company had been growing rapidly in the wake of its first two productions, Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, and had taken over a big lot in the middle of town, which had seen brighter days back when it was home to a slew of different manufacturers. Pixar was erecting its building on the former site of a Dole cannery.

  Steve met me in the parking lot. The construction crews had left hours earlier; the only other people on the lot were two security guards. Steve directed me to go in through a side door, rather than the main doors, which were cut into the big glass wall where visitors and employees enter today. “Look up,” he said, before I opened the door.
“Look up at those bricks. Have you ever seen a brick wall with so many colors? Just look at those bricks!” It was true; the bricks were, and still are, quite lovely. Each is one of twenty-four different earthy shades, from yellowish taupe to rust to maroon to chocolate brown with many more shades in between. The overall effect from a distance is of something like a subtly checkered moiré, with discolorations rippling through the surface in what seems like a totally random fashion. Except that it isn’t random at all. The bricks were manufactured by a single beehive kiln in Washington State, one that Steve’s supplier had reopened solely for the purpose of manufacturing bricks with the specific shades that Steve demanded. A couple of times, when Steve visited the construction site and saw the wall going up with a randomness that he deemed unpleasing, he had asked workers to tear down the wall. Eventually, the construction team figured out an algorithm of sorts to ensure that the bricks were distributed in a “perfectly” random pattern.

  Again and again as we walked around the property, Steve delighted in both showing me a detail and explaining all the work that had gone into getting it just right. Inside the building, enormous steel girders gave off a greenish hue; they were beams from a unique mill in Arkansas, and had been varnished to achieve that extremely natural look. The workers at the mill had been told to handle them with special care; while most of their beams would be hidden within the walls of a shopping mall or skyscraper, these were never going to be covered up. The bolts holding those beams in place were of a slightly different, complementary color; Steve had me climb up a big ladder so I could get close enough to notice. Down in the atrium central lobby, the brick dome atop the cafeteria’s wood-fired oven for baking pizza, constructed with the same bricks as the exterior walls, was perfectly round, a mason’s masterpiece. Outside, youngish sycamore trees lined the long, broad path to the front door, the same kind of sycamores that line the Champs-Élysées in Paris, a city he and Laurene loved.