I,Steve

and the floppy disk and nineteen other tech devices, for telling me when he had heard enough of my raving about Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs book, “Read I,Steve.  Read I, Steve.”  Well, Morley was right…again.   This book is a gem, best read one small page at a time.  I, Steve is a collection by George Beahm of hundreds of Jobs quotes, all the way from before the Apple to just before his passing in 2011.  Although I am usually an advocate of “don’t believe what I say, believe what I do,” these sharp little looks into Jobs’ inner workings – his spiritual take on life and work, his approach to selecting and building technologies, and one of the things I most loved about the man, his fine appreciation for industrial design – are unavailable elsewhere.  It’s one thing to get the historical perspective on Jobs’ life and industry from Isaacson, but I think in the end it’s more telling and personal to hear where his mind was going with all that he believed in.  It strikes me that Jobs was a curious blend of 60’s bravado and curiosity, zen thinker, talented technologist, but stronger than I expected, a corporate warrior ready to walk if it was the right time, and ready to fight if he had to.  What an earthshaking combination of characters in one persona! Editor Beahm gathers the Jobs material from interviews, press clips, conference appearances, and earlier books.  Here are three among the best:Page 58 – This Christmas pulled out the plastic and got an iPad.  We saved the box and cellophane because the experience of just opening the package was so perfectly designed.  Rocket scientist/naval architect husband Doug takes his new friend everywhere, even the bathroom, and drives with the device carefully balanced on his knees.  That iPad has been more places in one month than our dog Nikki went all his seventeen years, and he met and sniffed Lauren Bacall’s Papillon Sophie outside the Dakota. It’s just too gorgeous to leave at home.  But little did we know that this product could have come out years earlier.  Jobs shelved it when he realized the iPhone launch was more pressing:IPad Inspires iPhoneI actually started on the tablet first.  I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multi-touch glass display.  And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multi-touch display that I could rest my hands on, and actually tupe on.  And about six months late, they called me in and showed me this prototype display.  And it was amazing.  This is in the early 2000s.  And I gave it to one of our other, really brilliant UI (user interface) folks, and he called me back a few weeks later and he had inertial scrolling working and a few others things.  I thought, My God, we could build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet project on the shelf because the phone was more important.  And we took the next several years, and did the iPhone.                          -D8 Conference, June 1 – 3, 2010                                I, Steve, In His Own Words, Edited by George Beahm, B2 Books,                                                                                                           Chicago, 2011, page 58Here is Jobs talking about the rough ups and downs that he experienced in his financials:    I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year… It’s very character-building.

                        -Apple Confidential 2.0, 2004, page 63

Another favorite, this one a clue toward how Jobs wanted the packaging and opening experience to feel this Christmas when Doug peeled back the cellophane on his new iPad:

Broad-Based Education

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do