Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs revolutionized many industries.

Walter Issacson wrote this exhaustive, extensively researched biography at Steve Jobs’s request – but not under Jobs’s control – soon after Jobs received his fatal cancer diagnosis. Isaacson explains how Jobs’s idiosyncratic interests related to one another and contributed to his success. The author doesn’t stint on tales of Jobs’s particular views on pretty much every subject, including his own illness. And, he illuminates his subject’s personality as he shows how Jobs revolutionized multiple industries.

Jobs was a perfectionist even as a child.  

Someone who knew Steve Jobs as a child might not have thought he’d ascend to the top of the business world by founding and running the “world’s most valuable company.” As Isaacson reports, his origins were modest, but even as a kid, Jobs displayed the curiosity, audacity and force of will that characterized his career. Adopted as an infant, he felt “chosen,” but battled lifelong residual feelings of abandonment. As a child, he was wildly precocious, brash and smart. In fourth grade, he tested at the level of a tenth grader.