Walter Isaacson

Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland's farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. " There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him," Cook said. " That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face to face meetings. " There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,"he said."Thats crazy, Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say ' Wow, and soon your cooking up all sorts of ideas." So he had the Pixar building planned to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. " If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity,"he said.

He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. " He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.

Walter Issacson biographer of Steve Jobs:I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, _ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don__. I think it__ 50/50, maybe. But ever since I__e had cancer, I__e been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more, maybe it__ because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn__ just all disappear. The wisdom you__e accumulated, somehow it lives on.__hen he paused for a second and said, __ea, but sometimes, I think it__ just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you__e gone._ And then he paused again and said, _ And that__ why I don__ like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.__oy to the WORLD! There IS an after-life!

Nevertheless, by dint of his personality and controlling instincts, Jobs was soon playing a stronger role. He spewed out a stream of ideas - some reasonable, others wacky - about what Pixar's hardware and software could become. And on his occasional visits to the PIxar offices, he was an inspiring presence. "I grew up a Southern Baptist, and we had revival meetings with mesmerizing but corrupt preachers," recounted Alvy Ray Smith. "Steve's got it: the power of the tongue and the web of words that catches people up. We were aware of this when we had board meetings, so we developed signals - nose scratching or ear tugs - for when someone had been caught up in Steve's distortion field and he needed to be tugged back to reality.

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.

Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy)

Form follows emotion

Just because you can't act EVERYWHERE doesn't mean you don't act ANYWHERE. _ Madeleine Albright

As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to "the difference personalities make".

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.

When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded.

More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.

You can't have a sustainable US economy without a great education system. Teach students to do the job right. You don't have an innovative economy unless you have a great education.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.