He sat down and started listening. The decision to create a foundation had already been made; the question now on the table was how to tell the world about Seva, its plans, and the men and women who would implement those plans. Steve found most of the ideas embarrassingly naïve. The discussion seemed more appropriate for a PTA meeting; at one point, everyone but Steve heatedly debated the finer points of a pamphlet they wanted to create. A pamphlet? That’s the best these people could dream up? These so-called experts may have achieved notable progress in their own countries, but here they were clearly out of their league. Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. That seemed obvious.
As the discussion meandered, Steve found his own attention wandering. “He had walked into that room with his persona from the Apple board meeting,” Brilliant remembers, “but the rules for doing things like conquering blindness or eradicating smallpox are quite different.” From time to time he’d pipe up, but mostly to interject a snide remark about why this or that idea could never fly. “He was becoming a nuisance,” says Brilliant. Finally, Steve couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you this as someone who knows a thing or two about marketing. We’ve sold nearly a hundred thousand machines at Apple Computer, and when we started no one knew a thing about us. Seva is in the same position Apple was in a couple of years ago. The difference is you guys don’t know diddly about marketing. So if you want to really do something here, if you really want to make a difference in the world and not just putter along like every other nonprofit that people have never heard of, you need to hire this guy named Regis McKenna—he’s the king of marketing. I can get him in here if you’d like. You should have the best. Don’t settle for second best.”
The room went silent for a moment. “Who is this young man?” Venkataswamy whispered to Brilliant. A handful of people started challenging Steve from different sides of the table. He gave as good as he got, turning the group discussion into a donnybrook, ignoring the fact that these were people who had helped eradicate smallpox from the planet, who were saving the blind of India, who negotiated cross-border treaties so they could perform their good works in multiple, even warring, countries. In other words, these were people who knew a thing or two about getting things done. Steve didn’t care about their accomplishments. He was always comfortable in a fight. Challenges, confrontations: in his limited experience, this was how you got things done; this was how the great stuff broke through. As the conversation heated up, Brilliant finally interjected: “Steve.” And then he yelled, “Steve!”
Steve looked over, clearly irritated by the interruption and anxious to get back to his argument.
“Steve,” said Brilliant, “we’re really glad you’re here, but now you’ve got to stop it!”
“I’m not going to,” he said. “You guys asked for my help, and I’m going to give it. You want to know what to do? You need to call Regis McKenna. Let me tell you about Regis McKenna. He—”
“Steve!” Brilliant shouted again. “Stop it!” But Steve wouldn’t. He just had to get his point across. So he took up his argument yet again, pacing back and forth as if he’d purchased the stage with his five-thousand-dollar donation, pointing directly at the people he was addressing as if to punctuate his remarks. And as the epidemiologists and the doctors and Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead looked on, Brilliant finally pulled the plug. “Steve,” he said, sotto voce, trying to remain calm, but ultimately losing it. “It’s time to go.” Brilliant walked Steve out of the conference room.
Fifteen minutes later, Friedland slipped outside. He returned quickly, and discreetly crept over to Brilliant. “You should go see Steve,” he whispered in his ear. “He’s out in the parking lot crying.”
“He’s still here?” Brilliant asked.
“Yeah, and he’s crying in the parking lot.”
Brilliant, who was presiding over the meeting, excused himself and hurriedly walked out to find his young friend, who was hunched over the steering wheel of his Mercedes convertible, sobbing, in the middle of the parking lot. The rain had stopped, and the fog had begun to settle in. He had put the top down. “Steve,” said Brilliant, leaning over the door and giving the twenty-four-year-old a hug. “Steve. It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry. I’m too wound up,” Steve said. “I live in two worlds.”
“It’s okay. You should come back in.”
“I’m going to leave. I know I was out of order. I just wanted them to listen.”
“It’s okay. Come back in.”
“I’m going to go in and apologize. And then I’m going to leave,” he said. And that is what he did.
THIS LITTLE ANECDOTE from the winter of 1979 is as good a place as any to start the story of how Steve Jobs turned around his life and became the greatest visionary leader of our time. The young man making a hash of his visit to the Garden of Allah that December evening was a mess of contradictions. He was a cofounder of one of the most successful startups ever, but he didn’t want to be seen as a businessman. He craved the advice of mentors, and yet resented those in power. He dropped acid, walked barefoot, wore scraggly jeans, and liked the idea of living in a commune, yet he also loved nothing more than speeding down the highway in a finely crafted German sports car. He had a vague desire to support good causes, but he hated the inefficiency of most charities. He was impatient as hell and knew that the only problems worth solving were ones that would take years to tackle. He was a practicing Buddhist and an unrepentant capitalist. He was an overbearing know-it-all berating people who were wiser and immensely more experienced, and yet he was absolutely right about their fundamental marketing naïveté. He could be aggressively rude and then truly contrite. He was intransigent, and yet eager to learn. He walked away, and he walked back in to apologize. At the Garden of Allah he displayed all the brash, ugly behavior that became an entrenched part of the Steve Jobs myth. And he showed a softer side that would go less recognized over the years. To truly understand Steve and the incredible journey he was about to undergo, the full transformation that he would experience over his rich life, you have to recognize, accept, and try to reconcile both sides of the man.
He was the leader and public face of the personal computer industry, and yet he was still a kid—just twenty-four years old, still in the early days of his business education. His greatest strengths were inextricably tied to his greatest weaknesses. As of 1979, those failings had not yet gotten in the way of his success.
In the years ahead, however, Steve’s tight bundle of contradictions would unravel. His stubborn strengths would give rise to Apple’s signature computer, the Macintosh, which would debut in 1984. But his weaknesses would lead to chaos in his company and exile for him personally, just one year later. They would sabotage his efforts to create a second breakthrough computer at NeXT, the company he founded shortly after leaving Apple. They would lead him so far from the heart of the computer industry that he would become, in the damning words of one of his closest friends, “a has-been.” They became so ingrained in his business reputation that when he was improbably invited back to run Apple in 1997, commentators, and even industry peers, would call the company’s board of directors “crazy.”
But then he pulled off one of the greatest business comebacks ever, leading Apple to the creation of a series of amazing products that defined an era and transformed a dying manufacturer of computers into the most valuable and admired company in the world. That turnaround wasn’t a random miracle. While away from Apple, Steve Jobs had started to learn how to make the most of his strengths, and how to temper somewhat his perilous weaknesses. This reality runs counter to the common myths about Steve. In the popular imagination, he is a tyrant savant with a golden touch for picking products and equally a stubborn son of a bitch with no friends, no patience, and no morals; he lived and died as he was born—half genius and half asshole.