Steve Jobs - Book Review

My Beautiful Journey with Steve Jobs

Reading is a joy and more so when we end up picking some good books to explore. That's exactly was my recent experience on reading this fat book with 531 pages about Steve Jobs. His biography was filled with lot of adventure and authenticity about his real life stories.  

While reading him, there were days I was really excited and smiling knowing his way of handling things at work and personal life. Sometimes there were judgements considering his arrogant nature in treating people around him. There were days of yawning too, when I had to read through about his many technical innovations and then there were days of warmth as well knowing his deep intrinsic values within.  👩 Such a mix ! 

I started this book few months back in September 2020  and it took me good number of months to complete, for the same reason that there was a good portion in the book that was not of my interest. But the persistence and  regularity of reading it daily though in small proportion was a big reason for happily completing this book. Now, there is a big sense of contentment within :) 

Reading Steve was more like being with him for almost 6 months. Knowing him exactly as two friends would know one another in each other's company.  His life shows a lot of similarity with that of any ordinary person who has seen the mountains of achievements and downfalls while sketching his personal and professional path. This helps in relating to him very well as we all have seen and known by now that life is not always a bed of roses. There will be dark  nights and stormy weather too before the days of spring welcomes us. 

Humans are humans. there are mood swings that we go through. There are mistakes that we do. There are feelings that we experience by knowingly or unknowingly hurting others and by being hurt by them.  His book includes the combination of such stories making it more exciting for us to read. 

He was a true legend and we all are enjoying the fruits of his innovation till today and for years to come. Few of my take away points to learn from his inspiring life story are:

1. Simplicity at his heart : He strongly believed in making his product as simple as possible. He often used to say that it is easy to make things complicated but it is difficult to make them simple. that is what he kept guiding to all his team mates.  

2. Detailing :He used to go to the detailing of each and everything to the core to understand the roots and plan & program accordingly.

3. Integrating all things together : In order to make the users feel the luxury and take all the responsibility of user experience up on his shoulders he always believed in integrating things rather than outsourcing it to someone. That's the reason that Apple has everything on its own of its own for the end to end fulfilment of the customer's need. 

4. Farsightedness - He always moved ahead of time thinking what would the people need after 5 years, 10 years or 20 years down the line. He never believed in going for a researched data to build a product rather he worked on his intuitiveness about the future. He was a man of intuition.

5. Aesthetics or looks mattered to him the most. He didn't compromise on any ground when it was about the look and feel of his products. Many a times, there were hundreds of rejections from his side just because the appearance was not to his taste. That pushed his team to come up with the luxury that the world is using today. 

 There were many more good things about him which you'd explore more when you'd read him. The author of his biography has done a great job by bringing in the key points of his life for the readers. it is touching and emotional too, esp. the way he bids farewell to everyone in the year 2011.

 Thank you Walter Isaacson (Author).

Happy reading !