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How This Book Came to Be

In the early suot a phone call from Steve Jobs He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado He’d be happy to coe He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk

That see as his preferred way to have a serious conversation It turned out that he wanted raphy of him I had recently published one on Benja one about Albert Einstein, and ly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence Because I assu career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred Not now, I said Maybe in a decade or then you retire

I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh He was petulant even then, attacking a Ti wounded hi to him afterward, I found myself rather captivated, as sointensity We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted fro to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tellhe had ever produced I liked him

When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put hion the most influential people of the century He had launched his “Think Different” ca iconic photos of so, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating

After I had deflected his suggestion that I write a biography of him, I heard from him every now and then At one point I ehter had told , the British computer pioneer who broke the Ger into a cyanide-laced apple He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t That started an exchange about the early history of Apple, and I foundon the subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a book When raphy came out, he caest, again, that he would ood subject

His persistence baffled uard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever read any of my books Maybe someday, I continued to say But in 2009 his wife, Laurene Powell, said bluntly, “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve, you’d better do it now” He had just taken a second medical leave I confessed to her that when he had first raised the idea, I hadn’t known he was sick Alht before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained

I decided then to write this book Jobs surprisedthat he would have no control over it or even the right to see it in advance “It’s your book,” he said “I won’t even read it” But later that fall he seeh I didn’t know it, was hit by another round of cancer co my calls, and I put the project aside for a while

Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2009 He was at home in Palo Alto with only his sister, the writer Mona Simpson His wife and their three children had taken a quick trip to go skiing, but he was not healthy enough to join them He was in a reflective an by recalling that he had wanted to build a frequency counter when he elve, and he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the founder of HP, in the phone book and call hiet parts Jobs said that the past twelve years of his life, since his return to Apple, had been hisnew products But his oal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said “Then I read so that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do” It was as if he were suggesting theraphy (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid) The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the hu personality was the topic that raphies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century

I asked Jobs why he wanted ood at getting people to talk,” he replied That was an unexpected answer I knew that I would have to interview scores of people he had fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared he would not be co them to talk And indeed he did turn out to be skittish ord trickled back to hi But after a couple ofpeople to talk to irlfriends Nor did he try to put anything off-lietting nant when I enty-three and the way I handled that,” he said “But I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out” He didn’t seek any control over what I wrote, or even ask to read it in advance His only involve the cover art When he saw an early version of a proposed cover treatment, he disliked it soa new version I was both a, so I readily assented

I ended up having more than forty interviews and conversations with hi roo walks and drives or by telephone During ly intih at tiues at Apple used to call his “reality distortion field” So of memory cells that happens to us all; at other ti his own version of reality both to me and to himself To check and flesh out his story, I interviewed more than a hundred friends, relatives, coues