That’s Men: Like most ‘ignorant’ men, Steve Jobs was complex beneath the surface

I once knew a man of whom the most frequently used description was “ignorant”. If you got a grunt out of him, you would be doing well. He was one of those people who put the phone down without saying goodbye and who, if he was “talking” to you face to face would simply turn and walk away when he considered the “conversation” over.

He astonished everyone when, in retirement, he married a woman who had worked in the same place and with whom, by all accounts, he lived out a life of contentment and marital happiness. What surprised people was that he could have such a thing as a romantic feeling and that he could get close enough to another human being, or she close enough to him, to marry.

I don't know why I should have remembered him when I was reading the book Becoming Steve Jobs, by Brent Schiender and Rick Tetzell, about the founder of Apple. I think it's because my "ignorant" man was more complex than he appeared to onlookers and the same was true of Jobs.

He, too, would have been called the Silicon Valley version of “ignorant” and worse by many of those who ran up against him.

The man credited with changing so much in our culture with the introduction of the iPhone and the iPad, not to mention the iMac, has frequently been depicted as a loud bully and a nightmare to work with.

But there was an awful lot more to him than that, and this matters because it provides a telling illustration that we don’t really know anything about people when we judge them by what little we see or hear of them.

It is certainly true that Jobs was aggressive and hurtful in much of his communication with people, so much so that he achieved the feat of getting fired from his own company.

Mature man

When he returned to Apple some years later and saved it from ruin he was a mature man who had learned a great deal from some very expensive mistakes.

But he could still roll his eyes rudely at meetings, tell people straight out that their carefully crafted proposals were crap, engage in anti-competitive deals with other companies in Silicon Valley whereby they agreed not to poach executives from each other, and so on. He could still scream down the phone at people who aroused his easily- aroused ire.

But any would-be Steve Jobs out there who thinks it’s all about screaming at people should realise that Jobs had other sides to him.

For example, he prioritised his family. He worked hard and put in long hours, but free time was for them. That was the case even before he began his long battle with cancer.

Second, his commitment to making really great products enabled his software developers, designers and engineers to do the very best work of their lives, and they knew that.

Third, he was a genius when it came to pulling together – in stunningly successful ways – the disparate ideas of various research teams at Apple.

For example, he could dismiss years of work on the development of the touchscreen and then, a few days later, realise that it wasn’t such a bad idea after all if it could be shrunk down to fit the smartphone being developed by another team.

Jobs could still behave in ways that were harsh and wrong in the eyes of much of the world, and it was all too easy to miss his good qualities. Those who would emulate Jobs might reflect on the fact that the harsh and wrong part is easy to do: the genius part is more difficult to achieve.

It’s a long way from Silicon Valley to where I met the ignorant man who never saw a computer in his life. But the story, in this sense, is the same: even the most apparently one- dimensional men become far more complex when you get a glimpse beneath the surface. That’s if anyone ever does.

pomorain@yahoo.com

Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.