60 Minutes Interview About Steve Jobs Contained Three Profound Revelations

I thought the 60 Minutes interview broadcast just now with Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson was great. Absolutely great.

It covered a lot of ground I was familiar with and is familiar to most other Apple fans too. But it fresh and fascinating because of the accumulation of small details and revelations. Like the fact that Jobs rarely locked his back door in Palo Alto, and that anybody could have walked in off the street, because he didn’t want to pervert his life by being rich. Alternatively, he looked his childhood friend Daniel Kottke in the eye and denied him the shares in Apple that would have made him a millionaire. So many contradictions.

But there were three profound revelations for me, which really shed light on Jobs’ life and work:

1. Jobs’ adoption as a baby made him feel special, not abandoned. Jobs told Isaacson about an occasion when a childhood friend learned he was adopted and asked him, in the brutal way that children do, if he was abandoned. Distraught, Jobs ran into the house and asked his adopted parents the devastating question. To their great credit, his parents had the perfect answer: No, he wasn’t unwanted. Quite the contrary, he was special because they had chosen him specially. Isaacson says this had a profound effect on Jobs and made him feel blessed, special. It goes a long way explaining Jobs’ amazing life and career, his outsized ambitions and confidence, his sense of mission.

2. Jobs’ infamous “reality distortion field” applied to his own cancer. One of the biggest revelations from Isaacson’s book was Jobs’ reluctance to get his cancer removed as soon as he learned about it. Instead of being operated on immediately, Jobs’ sent nine months seeking alternative treatments, before finally having his cancer surgically removed. The delay may have allowed the cancer to spread and cost him his life. Isaacson said Jobs later regretted this and may have been indulging in “magical thinking” about the cancer. If he ignored it, perhaps he wouldn’t have to deal with it. This strikes must people as crazy, especially from a rationalist like Jobs. But earlier,  Isaacson discussed Jobs’ famous “reality distortion field:” the ability to make coworkers believe almost anything through the force of his own persuasion. He could generate a ring of charm so powerful it could bend reality itself. Jobs often used it to push coworkers and underlings to perform impossible feats of work or creativity, like banging out three months of code in less than a month. Isaacson said Jobs was able to do this because he himself was convinced they could do it, even if it was magical thinking. But a month later, the work would be done, and he would be proved right. His thinking was no longer magical because it had come true. And he did this throughout his career, over and over. But what happens when happened when you apply magical thinking to cancer? As Isaacson noted, Jobs “could drive himself by magical thinking. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.”

3. Jobs hated on/off switches because they reminded him of death. Towards the end of his life, Isaacson asked Jobs if he believed in God. Jobs said no, not really, he kinda hoped there was a 50/50 chance of life after death. But then Jobs added that life and death was probably like an on/off switch. “Sometimes I think it’s like an on off switch: click and you’re gone.” Jobs felt it a terrible waste of accumulated experience and wisdom, and that’s why, he said, he didn’t like on/off switches on Apple products.

What else did you think was fascinating? (You can watch the whole interview with Walter Isaacson here, btw)

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.

Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.

He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.

Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.

Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.

Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.

Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.

Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.

Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.

He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.

Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.

You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.