Steve Jobs - Philosophy, Psychology & Legacy

31 Oct 2011    

Whilst the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson is a worthwhile read that makes many interesting observations, it doesn’t pull the pieces together and build either a clear philosophical or psychological profile of Steve Jobs. In this article I want to address that issue, I want to take my readers on a journey into the mind of Steve Jobs. I want to make sure that when you have finished reading this article, you’ll have something more than just an intriguing set of historical facts in your head, you’ll feel qualified to have a proper deep meaningful intellectual conversation about Steve Jobs.

The extent of Walter Isaacson’s failure is apparent the moment you start reading the reviews of his biography in the press. For example, the book review at the Financial Times starts “Those seeking clues to national revival in his success are likely to be disappointed”. What they are saying is that there is little other American businessmen can learn from Steve Jobs, he was a one off eccentric with a lot of magical marketing tricks up his sleeve who succeeded so spectacularly because he was in the right place at the right time. The review concludes by quoting Isaacson: “Steve Jobs was able to infuse into Apple’s DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make Apple likely to be, even decades from now, the world’s most successful company at the intersection of artistry and high technology”. The Financial Times follows this quote by saying “At this point, it feels as though the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field may have won the day - but one could be forgiven for hoping that Isaacson is actually right”.

I think one of the reasons that the Financial Times book review, and that of many other newspapers, has gone so far off course is that they have focused on the eccentric viciousness of Steve Jobs, they have allowed their personal distaste to colour their analysis. Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson: looking back there are things I am not proud of and should have handled differently, but I have no skeletons in the closet. In his youth his ex-girlfriend called him an “enlightened being who was cruel”, he cheated a friend out of some money, he cheated a telephone company out of more, it's certainly way short of murder. Looking for the “bad”, we can say that the most obvious thing about Steve Jobs is that he was a sort of good version of Anders Behring Breivik, that is an aggressive idealistic anarchist on a crusade to rebuild the world who imagined himself as a powerless but brilliantly intelligent little guy fighting against an all powerful but completely mindless elite. Steve Jobs drove a car without licence plates and parked in disabled bays, anarchists don't feel obliged to abide by the rules of civilized society because they think society isn't really civilized, it's actually corrupt. Breaking the rules helps the anarchist maintain his sense of uniqueness, breaking the rules also shakes the bourgeoisie out of its woolly sleep and steals the hearts and minds of their bourgeois children. So popular revolutionaries run circles around the elite, they wow the world by doing everything differently, they are not just a breath of fresh air, they are a veritable tornado of charisma. Kids around the world hang their picture on the wall and think why can't my father be like that? But what was the enigmatic Steve Jobs actually like? Over the course of this article we will pin Steve Jobs down, we will reveal him to be a sort of 21st Century philosophical version of the utilitarian revolutionary Che Guevara. The Financial Times dismisses him as a lunatic, but such a person is always mad when he is young, and unlike the aging rock stars who still wear leather jackets and snort cocaine, he improved dramatically with age.

What I am saying is that in order to find the “good” in Steve Jobs, one has to search for the good by suspending personal belief and seeing life through his eyes, one must not allow oneself to be blinded by the conflict between his unusual message and one's own ego. Geniuses often appear mad and often appear vicious. Consider Margaret Thatcher, for example, as a mini-genius. She wasn’t as vicious as Jobs, but she was hated by a lot people at the time, her own party turned against her, she resigned in disgrace, and her reputation only grew as the world evolved and we understood what was she was trying to do in hindsight. This is the famous idea that true genius can’t be understood by contemporary historians, but only by future generations. In fact, the whole idea of a popular genius is philosophically absurd, the modern idea of a universally appealing messiah is a myth. Jesus was crucified, Socrates was forced to drink hemlock. You see real genius is not a simple specialist skill, it is a philosophical viewpoint that is more advanced that the rest of society, a viewpoint which in its day is always reviled because it rejects the prevailing zeitgeist, a viewpoint which is ahead of its time and which is only appreciated by future generations.

We can understand this more clearly by thinking about something Schopenhauer said: “Talent hits the target everyone can see, genius hits the target others can’t see”. So a genius is someone who can see something others can’t see. He goes against the grain, he thinks out of the box, he is an iconoclast. He is always reviled because he thinks differently to everyone else. Think about Isaacson’s statement: “Steve Jobs was able to infuse into Apple’s DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make Apple likely to be, even decades from now, the world’s most successful company at the intersection of artistry and high technology”. The targets no one else could see are both products at the intersection of artistry and high technology, and the DNA for producing them. Until very recently competitors sold their PCs in beige boxes differentiated by how fast their CPU runs, it took them an incredibly long time to see the “products at the intersection of artistry and high technology” target. If you walk in a shop selling computers today you will see how everyone is now trying to build beautiful looking computers with gorgeous user friendly interfaces, high tech is no longer a geeky industry, it’s as much about design as it is computational power. To an extent, the importance of design has become yesterday news, most people realise that the tech industry has become more like the car industry as it has matured, i.e. revolving around sleek aluminium Audi TTs instead of boxy steel Ford Model Ts. Now the debate has moved onto the far more mysterious target Steve Jobs saw, namely the idea of a new corporate DNA.

So the questions people ask today are: What is the DNA Steve Jobs was aiming at? How can we describe his vision of Apple’s ideal business culture and creative process? How did his vision differ from standard business practices? Competitors realise this DNA must exist because despite now understanding the general goal of producing products at the intersection of art and technology, they can't figure out how to actually produce them. Over and over again Apple keep beating them, it can't just be luck, Apple must be doing something different. In fact, Philosophers say: leave the study of “the good” to priests and lawyers, instead study the mindset that creates the good. Hence philosophers focus on “virtue” not “good”, and say “know thyself”, or “whether thy motives are virtuous or selfish”, is the magical philosophical key that enables individuals to live a good life. In the same way you can't really comprehend products at the intersection of art and technology in of themselves, you need to go behind the surface and understand the process that creates them. So unless you can understand Apple's DNA, you can't actually understand the essence of their products, so you can't replicate their success unless you are prepared to slavishly copy their designs. For example, think about Sony. Long ago Japan produced slavish copies, but eventually they they developed their own Eastern DNA of excellence, and then companies such as Sony started producing better products than their Western competitors. Ironically, their success caused them to interbreed with Western DNA, and Sony's corrupted mix has proven devoid of excellence. The point I am making here is that DNA is everything, you need to focus on virtue not good, you need to focus on the culture not the products themselves. This is why Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson that his legacy is not the products he created, it's Apple itself, the embodiment of a new 21st Century corporate DNA.

In search of Steve Jobs' DNA, let’s take a look at another example of a success business man who also prides himself on “thinking differently”. Michael O'Leary is a famously gruff character who despises “corporate bullshit”. Corporate practices today do not exist in a vacuum, they reflect the prevailing psyche of society. Michael O'Leary, like Steve Jobs, is a person who fights against political correctness, human resources departments, civilized corporate culture, padded expense accounts etc. As corporations age they turn in on themselves, they start to become self serving. People who work for large companies often talk about a political culture which gets in the way of giving the customer what he actually wants. The managers turn into self serving golf playing Kool-Aid drinking politicians, Steve Jobs calls them “bozos with no clue about product”, and their company gradually fails. People like Michael O'Leary and Steve Jobs try to shake up the corporate culture by destroying the political culture, by creating a culture of unpretentious rough and tumble honestly. Critics call them inhumane, but they fail to see that what they call humanity is just a self interest that points in the opposite direction to the product, so their humanity is the antithesis of idealism, their justice is really injustice, their good is really evil.

Steve Jobs said the correct business culture is a combination of brutal honesty and brutal discipline. Long ago idealists used to say never lie to people, never try to play with peoples minds, never pander to people for the sake of their love. That doesn't mean transparency, it doesn't mean confusing people with information they are not ready for, in fact it's associated with complicated language and even speaking in riddles. What it means is never trying to trick people with the sort of simple shadowy arguments politicians and journalists are famous for. In a democracy, and in a normal company today, everyone wants consensus and inclusion, no-one wants to be just told what to think and do, so experts have to become journalists and win their arguments with poetry instead of science. At the factory floor end of the organization people tend to be ordered around, but by the time one reaches the board room it's pure politics. Long ago idealists called politicians and orators evil because they play a sort of dark side game involving false images, false pleasures and hypnosis. This creates a kool-aid group thinking ideological culture, it begins with urbane diplomacy, one day it becomes like a naive liberal arts clique, and eventually it ends with mindless twitter, facebook and pornography. Steve Jobs despised modern culture generally, but because this political culture intensifies as one goes up through the organization, reaching it's height in non executive board members, Steve Jobs was most disparaging about the elite.

Steve Jobs said get rid of the muddle headed ideological human values based culture, kill all the sacred cows, rip up the search for consensus and political correctness, hammer people don't stroke them. Talk honestly with fellow experts, educate your new recruits, and just tell everyone else how it is. Create a culture of discipline and loyalty revolving around expertise, not the shared emotional humanitarian values of lovers - it's an inverse vision of Western modern society. In the West we say we love a person for what he is, for what we can connect to with feelings, eg a man with a Californian personality. Eastern mystics say they love a person for what he is not, for what they cannot connect to by feelings, eg a creator of power supplies. In the West we love the bright colour of sun flowers speaking to us, in Japan they love the silent indescribable shape of the changing bonsai tree. In the non-emotive organization experts become dehumanized and pragmatic, they don't get caught in dogma. The Steve Jobs management structure is frightening to those steeped in a political culture, it looks a bit like a “pirate ship” because in a sense no-one is in overall control. In the West we have the idea that “the buck stops with the President”, but in an expert culture the buck is built from lots of pieces that stop in lots of different places.

To understand the depoliticised management structure consider Japan. If you look at the Japanese nuclear disaster the scientists were clearly sucked into a culture of non-expert political consensus which meant they had to constantly sweep facts under the carpet for the sake of consensus, and eventually they completely lost sight of the truth. Long ago Japan had an pragmatic dehumanized culture in which politicians and journalists would have just accepted the advice of experts without question. If a guy who knew more about tsunamis than them walked into the room and gave a lecture about the possibility of a wave that would swamp their facility, they would have loved his knowledge about what they didn't know, they would have listened to him and followed his advice, not worried about the political status quo. Japan flourished under it's scientific culture, but when it was turned upside down, when it became an ideological culture instead of an expert culture they stagnated. Steve Jobs talked about the upside down management structure of the modern world in which the experts are on the bottom and clueless politicians rule the world. This upending of the Japanese management culture was especially catastrophic for Japan because the way of poetic instead of pragmatic analysis is so alien to their nature, indeed it created a total political conformity, companies like Sony went from being cutting edge to completely visionless.

Looking at the various reviews of Isaacson’s book, elite liberal newspapers such as the Financial Times and the New York Times are the most disparaging towards Steve Jobs. These papers are so steeped in politically correct humanitarian liberal culture, they find people like Steve Jobs totally outrageous. They can’t see how liberalism has failed, how it has created a society of woolly thinking self obsessed narcissists. They can’t see that liberalism has failed in business just as surely as it has failed in European Union politics. So they write people like Steve Jobs off, like the medieval ideologues they say this man was not a genius, he was an evil witch with a “reality distortion field” who should have been burned at the stake.

Steve Jobs was far more radical and enigmatic than Michael O'Leary. Whereas Michael O'Leary is a sort of Tea Party capitalist, Steve Jobs despised populism. For example: Michael O'Leary gives the customer what he wants, low prices, because it makes him rich; but Steve Jobs didn't care about profits or market research, instead he built his products for the gods and the history books. Just as the gods favour the virtuous, so Steve Jobs claimed that whilst immoral capitalist hell often outsells heaven in the short term, idealistic perfectionist heaven always wins in the end. In this Steve Jobs offers real hope for mankind, he says the little guys always triumphs in the end if he keeps true to idealism. If there is any single episode that really sums up this hope for the world, it's the moving story of Steve Jobs and his loyal friend and lieutenant John Lasseter going slowly bankrupt making computer animations for love not money at Pixar. Against all the odds they came back from the lonely abyss, that love turned into some of the most successful and beautiful animations in history, that love triumphed over soulless populist capitalist incumbents such as Disney, that love was finally recognised, embraced and applauded by mankind. Walter Isaacson describes a conversation between Jobs and Rupert Murdoch in which Jobs said “It’s not about left or right anymore, it’s about constructive or destructive - and you are destructive”. Murdoch dismissed him as a socialist, but that completely misses the point. Steve Jobs horrified the socialists with his idealistic social conservatism as much as he horrified the capitalists with his idealistic communalism.

So Steve Jobs was neither a gruff Wall Street Journal capitalist, nor a whining New York Times liberal, he was so far away from the prevailing zeitgeist he was off the political map. The Financial Times called Steve Jobs “one of a kind”, but in reality, of course, they just don’t want to admit what he really was. He was not socialist or capitalist, nor Catholic or Puritan. He was a Zen Buddhist and he once said “I would swap all my technology for an afternoon with Socrates”. He was Greek not Hebrew, Eastern not Western. Steve Jobs was, of course, the first businessman in the West who connected with Eastern philosophy. He was ahead of his time, he picked up the changing zeitgeist, his targets were the beautiful and good targets Eastern philosophers can see but which remain invisible to corrupt eyes.

Even in his 40s and 50s, Steve Jobs had a famously sharp tongue - but unlike Michael O'Leary he cared about something beyond the bottom line. He inflicted pain on his employees because he passionately believed that the only thing that matters in life is human evolution toward enlightenment. Jesus was the nurturing Shepard messiah who taught the masses happy love, Socrates was the Philosopher King messiah who waged war on the mindless elite. Steve Jobs was a Socrates not a Jesus, and if one thinks about it, Socrates is much more in tune with the modern world than Jesus. The Roman Empire was, by in large, efficiently run by pragmatic disciplined soldier-statesmen such as Marcus Aurelius, but the spoilt Roman masses disconnected from idealism and economic power moved East to Constantinople. So the simple emotional non-political religion of Christianity naturally developed as an antidote to mass corruption. Today Western democracy has produced, first and foremost, corrupt and incompetent leadership, so today the elite are at the epicentre of social evil, thus demanding a more Socratic rather than Christian response. Socrates taught an intellectual philosophy for the elite, not a faith based religion for the masses, and unlike Christianity he directly addressed real world ethical problems and described a completely anti-capitalist anti-liberal anti-democratic socioeconomic model which shocks the modern Western elite. Steve Jobs was not just a New Age Californian hippy with an interest in Zen Buddhism, he connected, perhaps more than any other famous person on this planet, to the essentially now long lost philosophical wisdom which began developing in Ancient Greece and Ancient China in 600BC. People think the Dalai Lama is a guru, but he no closer to Socrates or Confucius than the Pope is to Jesus. Steve Jobs embodied Eastern philosophy more than any other person I have come across. As both Socrates and Confucius pointed out, in a sophisticated philosophical society, rather than a simple traditional or religious society, the elite must live the Spartan life, when the elite start granting themselves the freedoms and comforts they provide for the masses the world ends. Steve Jobs certainly understood this, he lived an ascetic life and treated his top employees as Spartan Generals not Athenian Statesmen. The Spartans walked barefoot, starved themselves, lived in wooden huts without furniture, tried to say everything in as few words as possible, and were rude to fools. The Athenian Statesmen dressed in purple silk, ate luxurious food, had household slaves and erotic affairs, and gave long saccharin speeches that made the foolish fall in love them.

In an article of mine written a few years ago I say:

One fascinating aspect of the Microsoft vs Apple debate is the way it reflects some of the issues in the economic debate between free markets vs state capitalism. The following three points illustrate this:

1. The fecklessness of laissez-faire. Apple is famous for its closed hardware system, the PC is famous for open standards and competition. You would have thought we would all prefer an open system, but it can become chaotic. For example, Apple was able to build such an amazing iPhone because it owned both the software and hardware. This is another example of the famous Railway Privatization Problem in the UK which was designed to introduce competition but ended in chaos. A closed system is often associated with higher prices, but economies of scale can actually work to the advantage of a more monopolized market. Apple is gradually developing economies of scale no competitor can touch, what we are increasingly seeing today is a world in which Apple and its competitors sell their products at about the same price, but because Apple has economy of scale advantages it can offer a much higher quality product than its competitors. The biggest danger of a monopolized market is excessive prices, market prices settle at what consumers are willing to pay, whereas in a competitive market prices are supposed to converge on what it costs to produce. Lenin argued that free markets degenerate into monopolies earning excessive profits, but his collective ownership solution failed miserably. The trendy new theory on the block is Chinese State Capitalism which prevents companies from making excessive profits and abusing the market either by heavy handed regulation or state ownership.

2. The greed of laissez-faire. A key element of the Apple concept is the App Store which protects consumers from bad software. One of the problems with commercial software is that it tends to become, to some extent, mal ware. Look at Norton Anti Virus - my personal favorite example of a god awful product driven by commercial pressures. Norton pay lap top manufactures to include it on the machine. They make it as hard as they can to uninstall. They fill it with lots of junk features you don't actually need, but because you are not an expert, you can be tricked into thinking you do need. They love messages that pop up so you retain brand awareness. They report harmless things as malicious to trick you into thinking they are doing a great job. Office Ribbon is another example of the problem of commercial pressures. Disappointed that users were not bothering to upgrade Microsoft set up to create something totally different. The change was not driven by virtue, but by commercial greed. The idea of capitalism is that it is efficient because the end user buys what maximizes his personal contentment. The complaint against capitalism is that the limited expertise and irrationality of consumers, combined with the selfish motives of producers, creates anomalies which destroy the utility maximizing process. Instead you end up with products that damage personal contentment.

3. The irrationally of laissez-faire. Steve Jobs said that working with Wozniak taught him that the difference between a real expert and everyone else is, as far as that subject is concerned, like the difference between “a god and a shit head”. Because Western minds generally think in terms of unidirectional moral compass like constructs, the elitism concept is usually confused with vertical power micro-managing tyranny in the West. Steve Jobs, however, understood both the active and passive sides of the elitist philosophical equation, and this allowed him to build a properly Eastern style collective rather than a Western style tyrannical or egalitarian system. To leverage expert inequality he built an organization in which experts are masters of themselves, but slaves to the collective. In other words, the collective world outside them only interests itself in what they are capable of producing, and on the basis of this information it sets them production goals, and it gives them the freedom to accomplish their goal as they see fit. From the individual’s point of view, he has complete creative power over his own domain, but no creative power over anything outside himself. For example, Steve says I want a device that doesn’t make a noise, and the power supply guy finds a way to implement that; whereas in a normal company the power supply guy would suggest a noiseless fan to Steve, and Steve then judges how worthwhile that idea is. Therefore in a normal company people are crossing into each of spheres of expertise, and over time management fills up with a bunch of unimaginative politicians who rely on the lower ranks and pretend to know everything about everything, and technical departments fill up with a bunch of would be politicians who want to run the whole show themselves. Steve Jobs imagined Apple as an efficient hive of bees minding their own business, he didn’t want a herd of group thinking hysterical sheep running round a field. The sheep herd’s failure to specialize, to mind one’s own business, creates both muddled thinking and wasteful duplication. What has all this to do with economics and politics? What we are saying here is that rational expectations doesn’t work, the fundament capitalist idea that market price is the best measure of utility and competition is the best way to deliver it, is nonsense. The market price is just the sheep herd’s wavering opinion, and the stupidity of the herd derives from competitive duplication. In the same way democracy also fails.

Now that we have briefly investigated the philosophy of Steve Jobs, let’s move onto Steve Jobs the man.

Let’s think about the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Bill Gates was also a bit of a rebel in his youth, he liked to pretend that he was asleep in mathematics lectures at Harvard, and then wake up to correct his lecturer’s mistakes. Bill Gates had amazing technical skills, and Microsoft’s programming was far more accomplished than Apple’s programming. In Isaacson’s book Bill Gates recalls that he had more people writing code for Apple than Apple had writing code for themselves. He destroyed Apple’s world processor, he destroyed Lotus, the world’s largest software company at that time, with his first version of Excel, and within a few years he had released an operating system that was far more technically advanced than Apples. The iPad’s browser was written by just two programmers, that’s nothing to be proud of, it suggests an almost hobbyist approach to computer engineering.

Yet Steve Jobs has built Apple into a company worth almost twice as much as Microsoft, and Microsoft’s technical skills have failed to produce good products. Windows Vista was said to be the world’s largest software - estimated at 10,000 employees working for five years - perhaps a $10 billion spend. Yet it was universally condemned and it proved shockingly unsuccessful. So Steve Jobs has another kind of skill, and it’s a skill so powerful that it has ultimately triumphed not only over Bill Gate’s technical skills, but also over his once seemingly adamantine monopoly.

We could call Steve Job’s skill something like philosophy, or psychology, or as Socrates would say “insight into human nature”. Bill Gates was the talented computer programmer who could hit his competitors targets more successfully that his competitors, but Steve Jobs was the genius who could see philosophical targets Bill Gates couldn’t see. No-one is going to read a book about Bill Gates to learn about the philosophy of technology or economics or society. Bill Gates is just a smart ordinary guy, Steve Jobs was in a different league, the sort of league that doesn’t just build good products, it sets an example that changes the entire world. The anti-capitalist protestors out on the streets today have rejected their fathers and are looking for a saviour, Steve Jobs is as close as this corrupt dying world has come to a new messiah. When the Financial times said there nothing other American businessmen can learn from Steve Jobs, it wasn't just slightly wrong, it was cosmologically wrong.

Steve Jobs was adopted, his biological mother was studying for her graduate degree when he born, and she very much wanted him to go into a well educated family. But as fate turns out he ended up being adopted by a humble family, and that was surely one of the secrets of Steve Jobs’ success. He was a very bright child, but he was not brought up by an intellectual family, nor sent to a school that could tax his mind. So instead of turning his mind to technical skills, as Bill Gates did, he withdrew and turned his mind to philosophy.

There is a famous biography of Paul Gauguin called “The Nobel Savage” which describes how Paul Gauguin learned to turn himself into a powerful magnetic personality and see what others can’t see by becoming an eccentric. Steve Jobs, like Gauguin, became an eccentric, and like Gauguin he took an interest in Eastern philosophy even at an early age. Just as Gauguin revolutionized painting and took his inspiration from Japanese Prints, Jobs revolutionized technology and took his inspiration from Japanese electronics (eg Steve Jobs famously studied the perfectionism, miniaturization, aesthetics and cultural values captured by the Sony Walkman).

I remember reading a story in Dr Michael Newton's Book “Journey Of Souls”. Newton was a psychiatrist who specialised in deep trance hypnosis, and one day he stumbled onto a hypnotic phenomena he named “Life Between Life Regression”. Whilst treating a patient by desensitizing his trauma under regression, he suddenly found his patient recalling what he believed to be a past life. The patient then recalled his death in this previous life, and then recalled himself shooting up through space and entering into a spiritual world, much like the famous near death experience some intensive care patients have described. Newton found that under deep hypnosis many of his patients could recall what they described as “the spiritual world one inhabits between human lifetimes”. One of his patients recalled a lifetime as a rich and tyrannical business man during the Great Depression. In the spiritual world he found himself standing in front of a panel of judges with a guide at his side. The judges asked him what he though the best thing that had he ever done in the earthly life he had just lived was. The man started talking about how he had run a successful business that employed a lot of people at a tough time. Then the judges stared at him, it was as if they could read his aura, and he felt his whole life being stripped bare by their eyes. They said do you remember helping that poor lonely woman at the buss stop? The man burst into floods of tears as he recalled the moment he put his arms around a destitute distraught women at a buss stop, it was the only time he had ever shown true love in his entire life, his business had always been about him, he had completely failed.

In Isaacson's biography Scully describes how Steve Jobs' piercing eyes could dig into one's soul, how Jobs could see straight through one's facade and penetrate the deepest recesses of one's humanity. Scully called it a painful humiliating invasion of privacy, it rendered one defenceless, it exposed all the soft weaknesses and hidden horrors of one's nature. Scully's story reminds me of Dr Newton's story about the terrifying panel of judges who looked into the tyrant's soul like merciless gods of karma. In fact Steve Jobs wasn't in the same league as Socrates or Confucius because he sort of felt his way around the psychology in a fuzzy fallible intuitive way rather than also being able to grasp it as perfect matrix he could perform algebra on, yet what he had was enough to make him a genius who transformed the world. Most people's psychological makeup is instinctive and unchanging, but you can see that Steve Jobs was using his conscious mind because he worked with energies that were completely alien to his own personality. For example he took the psychological essence of Sony at it's best and integrated it into Apple even though he himself was an anarchist far away from the modern Japanese personality. This ability to read people, to be anything, to change personality in accordance to the environmental challenge, made him extremely enigmatic and multifaceted. If he hadn't been a entrepreneur philosopher he might have been an actor or a salesman or a therapist.

Steve Jobs had another use for his piercing eyes. Think about the politicans running Europe. They are constantly flapping around, their incompetence stems from their inability to let go of themselves and focus on the problem in front of them. Isaacson's biography describes Steve Jobs meeting Obama. Steve Jobs said “Obama kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done, it infuriates me”. Steve Jobs said that if you can focus laser like on what needs to be done you can move mountains. Steve Jobs pinned people down, he didn't let them flap around, he fixed his eyes on them and boomed words to effect of: “this and only this needs to done, don't give me any excuses, don't ask me for any alternatives, trust me I know you can do it, so do it right now”. Over and over again his piercing eyes and powerful words turned muddle headed employees into gods who went on to triumph against seemingly insurmountable odds. Politicans fail because their heads are stuffed full of things which they are constantly trying to juggle, they can't focus on the target and dedicate themselves to it, they are always looking for magical bullets, their whole life is dedicated to making excuses and trying to do things on the cheap. So Steve Jobs taught people to let go of their baggage and focus on the one thing that actually needs to be done. He called called it switching off dogma, ideology and emotional noise, it's the Zen Buddhist idea of perfect laser like focus and the dehumanized machine like Japanese Samurai is the ultimate example of it. If you think about the difference between a Spanish and a German plumber, it really comes down to this difference in their ability to focus. As it happens, Steve Jobs wasn't mentally disciplined himself, but he understood the psychology well enough to draw it out of others, and well enough to get by on his own as long as he was doing something he enjoyed. Remember “genius hits the target others can’t see”, Steve Jobs was an ideas man not a technical man, Socrates might say a hunter rather than a farmer.

People like Paul Gauguin and Steve Jobs are not straight line thinkers, they think in terms of opposites and harmonies. That's why Steve Jobs did strange things like study Sony's letterhead to understand the essence of their psychology. In the film “Hero” the Chinese warrior tells the emperor he defeated the assassin by studying his calligraphy, learning the essence of his swordplay. It sounds absurd to straight line thinkers, but it makes sense to the more philosophical Chinese who famously think in terms of psychological dualities. There are three different basic modes of philosophy, and Steve Jobs is what we call a person who looks for “how the many are one”, whereas Paul Gauguin is a person who looks for “how the one becomes many”. To see this, consider the relationship the between the whole and the parts in the following two examples:

Paul Gauguin : How the one becomes many… change… growth…

“With a harmonious gesture the man raises a heavy axe in his two hands. It leaves above his head an impression in the silvery sky, and below a rosy incision in the dead tree, where for an inflammatory moment the ardour stored up day to day throughout the centuries will come to life again. On the purple soil long serpentine leaves of metallic yellow make me thing of a mysterious writing on the ancient orient. They distinctly form the sacred world of Oceanic origin, ATUA, God, the Taata or Takata or Tathagata, who rules throughout the Indies. And there came to mind like a mystic council, in harmony with my beautiful solitude and my beautiful poverty the words of the sage..”

Steve Jobs : How the many are one… rest… inheritance…

“Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.”

This concern with the one very much coloured Apple’s development. It motivated Apple’s constant search for simplicity and minimalism. The philosopher who seeks the one is withdrawn and sensitive, if he is weak he is a romantic charmer, but if he an idealist he is a fighter for justice - Socrates says the challenge this type must overcome is “viciousness”. The philosophical focus on the one gave Apple enormous vision, yet it also has its dangers, and in a way the death of Steve Jobs came at the right time. If the iPad is really to become a PC replacement instead of a bourgeoisie toy for browsing on the couch, it will need more design compromises or it will end up like MacWrite in back in 1984, which was out gunned by Microsoft’s more functionally complete product. Apple need to think about the many as well as the one, and to find the harmony between them. The truth is Apple doesn't have the depth of a company like Microsoft, it doesn't have nearly the same technical programming skills, and it needs to become a deeper organization if the iPad is going to become functionally complete. That kind of technical detail bored Steve Jobs, but it's a necessary part of being the worlds largest technology company.

Philosophers like Socrates had extremely disciplined structured minds and were able to justify their position, but due to his upbringing Steve Jobs never developed mental discipline. Without the ability to justify himself in argument, he learned to trust his own instincts, and he developed enormous self confidence. In a sense his inability to examine himself was both his strength and his weakness.

Isaacson’s book describes the development of the Apple Stores. Gateway wasted a lot of money building physical stores, and Dell’s online only model was widely regarded as superior. But Steve Jobs decided Apple needed a physical store and told his board of directors. They argued against him, but he wouldn’t back down. He said our stores will be better than Gateways because will put them in the centre of town and make them huge and beautiful. They were horrified, but Steve Jobs insisted. He built an experimental store on the Apple campus and spent months tweaking the design. He even patented two new ideas for building glass staircases that he personally invented whilst working on the design. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and one of the board members, eventually refused to come and visit him anymore because every time he turned up Steve insisted on taking him on another tour of his shop to show him what they had achieved. On the eve of the opening one of the people working with him said I think we have done the wrong thing, instead of organizing the shop around products, we should organize the shops around activities. Steve Jobs clicked and immediately delayed the entire project for a complete redesign. When the stores opened Business Week wrote an article: “Sorry Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work”. Yet they did work, and spectacularly so. The Apple Store on fifth avenue is the highest earning store in New York, and it contributes to brand value. Today technology shops across the world have picked up Apple’s ideas, and minimalist airy interiors with white walls are now commonplace. This is just one of the many examples of how over and over again Steve Jobs’ hunches came in right.

Yet Steve Jobs failed on occasion too, especially in his earlier years. There is the terrible story about the absurdly expensive production line at NeXT, although that experience proved beneficial by teaching him the advantages of outsourcing. There is his refusal to take the advice of his doctors and put his faith in New Age diets instead. There is also Jonathon Ive’s cutting story about how his inhumane challenging manner sometimes proved counterproductive. Perhaps Steve Jobs could have leaned a thing or two about creating an idealistic non-political culture if he had studied NASA or Chinese technocracy instead of anarchism. Once one has created a hive of expert bees instead of a sheep herd, viciousness can give way to politeness.

But most seriously, Steve Jobs, by his refusal to cross examine himself and test his philosophy, never found the peaceful harmony he surly spent a lifetime searching for. He made the mistake of never properly turning his philosophical skills inwards and examining himself. Without this ability one can never “know oneself”, so one has to rely on the slow evolutionary process of overcoming external challenges to evolve instead of going on an inner intellectual journey. If Steve Jobs had gotten to spend an afternoon with Socrates, and he had learnt the art of self cross-examination, he might have lost his viciousness and found the peaceful inner tranquillity and enlightenment he was always looking for.