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a5bc9e9
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Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. "I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble." It also soon became clear that Jobs, by both nature and nurture, was not disposed to accept authority."
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Walter Isaacson |
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The year before, 279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs and its clones.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Von Neumann, by contrast, wore a three-piece suit at almost all times, including on a donkey ride down the Grand Canyon; even as a student he was so well dressed that, upon first meeting him, the mathematician David Hilbert reportedly had but one question: Who is his tailor?45
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Walter Isaacson |
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d047386
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If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.
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Walter Isaacson |
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At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn't.
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Walter Isaacson |
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6396983
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By this point Jobs had poured close to $50 million of his own money into Pixar--more than half of what he had pocketed when he cashed out of Apple--and he was still losing money at NeXT. He was hard-nosed about it; he forced all Pixar employees to give up their options as part of his agreement to add another round of personal funding in 1991. But he was also a romantic in his love for what artistry and technology could do together.
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Walter Isaacson |
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f08bc38
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Jobs had a tougher time navigating the controversies over Apple's desire to keep tight control over which apps could be downloaded onto the iPhone and iPad. Guarding against apps that contained viruses or violated the user's privacy made sense; preventing apps that took users to other websites to buy subscriptions, rather than doing it through the iTunes Store, at least had a business rationale. But Jobs and his team went further: They deci..
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Walter Isaacson |
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aed8ff3
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To dwell on the things that depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone." His"
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Walter Isaacson |
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0f9a418
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A few years later, Jobs described to Wired the process that went into getting a new washing machine: It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better--but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don't trash your clothes. They use a lot less so..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying. What
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Walter Isaacson |
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Lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business. You've got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.
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Walter Isaacson |
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a765b3d
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Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it."
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leadership
motivation
narrative
storytelling
writing
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Walter Isaacson |
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7ab977f
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Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained--80% of the company--were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he'd made when Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of the New York Times that the money did not mean much to him. "There's no y..
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Walter Isaacson |
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0b6a47c
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At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. "I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company,"
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Walter Isaacson |
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794c872
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Bushnell agreed. "There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve," he said. "He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, 'Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.' "
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Walter Isaacson |
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33259d6
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were creating crawlers that would serve as search tools for the Web. These included the WWW Wanderer built by Matthew Gray at MIT, WebCrawler by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, AltaVista by Louis Monier at the Digital Equipment Corporation, Lycos by Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, OpenText by a team from Canada's University of Waterloo, and Excite by six friends from Stanford. All of them used link-hopping ro..
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Walter Isaacson |
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953db38
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The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste," he said. "I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product."
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Walter Isaacson |
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b2e70c2
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La mejor manera de predecir el futuro es inventarlo>>.
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Walter Isaacson |
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The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often discussed with him why those immersed in the rock-drugs-rebel counterculture of the Bay Area ended up helping to create the personal computer industry. "The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently," he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Ja..
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Walter Isaacson |
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d9b5202
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Art Levinson, who was on Apple's board, was chairing the board meeting of his own company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs's name appeared on the screen. As soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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pleaded every day" with Jobs and found it "enormously frustrating that I just couldn't connect with him." The fights almost ruined their friendship. "That's not how cancer works," Levinson insisted when Jobs discussed his diet treatments. "You cannot solve this without surgery and blasting it with toxic chemicals." Even Dr. Dean Ornish, a pioneer in alternative and nutritional methods of treating diseases, took a long walk with Jobs and ins..
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Walter Isaacson |
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7afc012
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Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!"
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Walter Isaacson |
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2b1b96c
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Loyalty to a party, Einstein felt, meant surrendering some independence of thought. Such conformity confounded him. "How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery,"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Therein lies the key, I think, to Einstein's brilliance and the lessons of his life. As a young student he never did well with rote learning. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That's the power of intuition and experiential wisdom. Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacit..
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Walter Isaacson |
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5b4a071
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Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end u..
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Walter Isaacson |
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c5b687e
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That was back when state governments valued education and realized the economic and social value of making it affordable.
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Walter Isaacson |
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db11bf5
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There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution,
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Walter Isaacson |
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This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital c..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Shakespeare's Henry V--the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king--begins with the exhortation "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention."
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Walter Isaacson |
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62676f6
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He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed in electronics and those who were into literature and creative endeavors. "I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology--Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear."
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Walter Isaacson |
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a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. "The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated," Rometty says, harking back to IBM's roots in Herman Hollerith's punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. "The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology,
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Walter Isaacson |
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Henry V--the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but
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Walter Isaacson |
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4e361e5
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Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving. They agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools--far less than on other realms of society such as media and medicine and law. For that to change, Gates said..
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Walter Isaacson |
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4c42c19
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Thirty years after Apple went public, he reflected on what it was like to come into money suddenly: I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wo..
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Walter Isaacson |
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We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
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Walter Isaacson |
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He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition about people," Kissinger once said of Rockefeller. "I have a first-rate mind but a third-rate intuition about people."
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Walter Isaacson |
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d2ae120
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The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and L..
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Walter Isaacson |
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c71b4d2
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Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him.
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Walter Isaacson |
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3dc203e
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There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.
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heritage
perspective
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Walter Isaacson |
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ef94699
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Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition,
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Walter Isaacson |
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05d58a3
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The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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4451804
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There was never a good knife made of bad steel
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Walter Isaacson |