Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

This is the biography book about the famous person - Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple Inc.. I think this book already got its historic mark as the best seller for 2011. Maybe millions of people had read it before me. Therefore, the book doesn't need any further input from me. Personally, this post is just to tick the book off from my reading list that I officially finished it. 

I was not Jobs' fan and had never thought a day I would be until I read this book. At the point of entrepreneur, he's not a great manager. He had never been given any praises on his brutal management style. However, from all his achievements, all I can say is he is a genius - A genius with all the perfection and imperfection of a human being,  a genius at the middle of artistry and technology. 

After reading the book, all I say is I owe him an apology. I didn't respect him much or even ignored him because of his dark side. Yet thinking again, I just wonder if I'll be brutal like him or even worse when someone is stealing my life products or ideas. Who knows if I would be even ten thousand times worse.  If I can send a word to Jobs, I'm just sorry for hating you so much when I didn't even know that much about you. That was the way you wanted people to think about you too, didn't you, Mr. Jobs? After all, it was not only me, not many people could understand Jobs, or even himself couldn't get it. 

I appreciate the silence as much as I'm aging. I don't need the world to know what I'm doing and why I'm doing that. After all, the bad and the good will reveal themselves gradually. To me, silence has its own power. To master silence, I need to pass the humble lesson first. As the blossom of social network nowadays, I think it's hard for many people to get the importance of silence. Not surprisingly that I also love the book because I found the same attitude on silence from Jobs. 

The last word for this book is that it encourages me to respect people's values more; or at least don't show the attitude when I don't know about them yet. It also aspires me to read more biography books that I've never enjoyed before. Finally, it reminds me that I haven't knocked enough to the doors of many genius' lives that I might have done earlier. 

The gift for me from Mr. Jobs: 

• Think Different
• Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
• Let me tell you 3 stories, no big deal [charm and friendly way to start a presentation]
• A players don't want to work with B or C players. Must be someone who can fire B or C players to keep A players up. 
• Understand what you're doing or else you're doing shit.
• Customers don't know what they want until you show it to them. 
• The passion to building and enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else is the secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. [A former CEO in Apple Inc.] flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. 
• If a company starts valuing the great salesmen, [because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers,] the salespeople end up running the company. When the sales guys run the company, the products guys don't matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off.