The Impact of Steve Jobs

The biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was released yesterday and Amazon is already saying it’s going to be the top selling book of 2011.  Sunday night on CBS’s show 60 Minutes, Isaacson spoke about the process of writing the book and what he learned about Jobs.

The timing is so weird to me that Jobs’s biography was planned to be at this time and is now so close to his death.

Seven years ago, Jobs asked Isaacson to write his biography.  Isaacson thought this was a little odd since Jobs was still young but what Isaacson didn’t know is that Jobs was about to have surgery for his pancreatic onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.cancertreatmentforums.com');" target="_blank" title="cancer" href="http://www.cancertreatmentforums.com">cancer.

Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than 40 times and interviewed about 100 of Jobs’s friends and coworkers and even critics and competitors.  Jobs’s wife wanted the book to be honest and real and that meant discovering and writing about the bad things too.

In the 60 Minutes segment last night, they shared some of the interviews with Jobs that Isaacson recorded.  One of the interviews they shared was about when he was a kid and he and his friend we’re talking about how he was adopted:

style="color: #333333;">[Steve Jobs, audio: I was, I remember right here on the lawn, telling Lisa McMoylar from across the street that I was adopted. And she said, "So does that mean your real parents didn't want you?" Ooooh, lightning bolts went off in my head. I remember running into the house, I think I was like crying, asking my parents. And they sat me down and they said, "No, you don't understand. We specifically picked you out."]

Isaacson said after this, Jobs knew that he wasn’t abandoned but that he was chosen and special.

The interview with Isaacson lasted for about a 30 minutes and the part the resonated with me the most throughout the whole thing was at the very end when Isaacson was talking about Jobs and the afterlife.

style="color: #333333;">Isaacson: I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of– maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on.” Then he paused for a second and he said, “Yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.” He said and paused again, and he said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”

I’ve always wondered why there really isn’t an on-off switch on Apple products and if this really is the reason, then wow.

You can read the transcript of the 60 Minutes special on their onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-20124391/steve-jobs-revelations-from-a-tech-giant/?tag=contentMain;contentBody');" target="_blank" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-20124391/steve-jobs-revelations-from-a-tech-giant/?tag=contentMain;contentBody">website.  You can also watch the segment online as well.

Jobs impacted all of our lives in ways we see and don’t see and in ways that will continue for many years to come.  I really wonder if I’ll be telling my kids or grandkids about Steve Jobs like the way I asked my parents about Ben Franklin or Einstein or Edison.

And in the words of one of my favorite Apple commercials “And 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.”