I’ve always been fascinated with how Steve Jobs was able to pop out of the personal computer industry and come slowly shining back in.
I’ve been reading his super thick biography – and I’m loving every page.
He’s a weird, bratty, petulant guy with some sort of a random shine. His brilliance is a vastly enjoyable thing to behold and yet his attitude and integrity is one of the worst.
You could say he is quite a bipolar.
A smart, charismatic and filthy rich bipolar.
I’ve drawn encouragements from this book such as when they started Apple in his parent’s garage and how he had formed his ragtag team to create a $1.7 billion company in 4 short years.
His life is such an entertaining read. He’s very weird in his beliefs, management techniques, product visionarism, relationships, etc. And yet, he’s revolutionized the computer, music, communication, entertainment, and other industries in a span of a few years.
The book sheds a lot of light to the quote he is most renown for:
“Here’s To The Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
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 !”
Am I crazy enough to do what he did? When Apple launched Macintosh and have reached more than $2 billion dollars worth, he personally owned just a mere 11% of the company. And yet that’s still worth more than $100 million.
At age 25, he was worth $256 million as a person.
Sad thing was it all got into his head. And he had to learn how to set it aside – and that propelled him to his late greatness.
I’m still learning a lot from his biography – it’s much more enlightening than the movie (although it was the movie that encouraged me to read his book – aside from its simple book cover/design).
I encourage young start-ups and entrepreneurs to read it too. It’s a mix of encouragement, enlightenment, mind-boggling mystery, regret, reality, and more.