Why did Apple “think different”?
As Steve Jobs said while introducing the iPad, the Mac maker was never just a tech company.
“The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts,” he said.
Jobs’ lifelong interest in the humanities gave Apple a human touch.
By combining tech and the liberal arts, Jobs said that Apple was able to “to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive, easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users.”
Jobs arrived at that perspective through a lifetime of reading, as reviewed in Walter Isaacson’s biography and other places. We’ve put together a list of 14 books that most inspired him.
Steve Jobs fell in love with ‘King Lear’ by William Shakespeare in his final years of high school.
Jobs really found his literary bent in the last two years of high school.
“I started to listen to music a whole lot,” he told Isaacson, “and I started to read more outside of just science and technology — Shakespeare, Plato. I loved ‘King Lear.'”
The tragedy may have provided a cautionary tale to a young Jobs, since it’s the story of an aged monarch going crazy trying to divide up his kingdom.
“‘King Lear’ offers a vivid depiction of what can go wrong if you lose your grip on your empire, a story surely fascinating to any aspiring CEO,” says Daniel Smith, author of “How to Think Like Steve Jobs.”
The CEO also enjoyed ‘Moby Dick’ by Herman Melville during his adolescence.
Another epic story colored Jobs’ outlook in his adolescence: “Moby Dick,” the deeply American novel by Herman Melville.
Isaacson draws a connection between Captain Ahab, who’s one of the most driven and willful characters in literature, and Jobs.
Ahab, like Jobs, did lots of his learning from direct experience, rather than relying on institutions.
“I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling,” the captain writes early in the story, “for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
‘The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas’ drew in Jobs for its popularity and creativity.
But the intellectual flowering that Jobs had in late high school wasn’t confined to hard-charging megalomaniacs — he also discovered a love for verse, particularly Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
“How To Think Like Steve Jobs” author Daniel Smith says that Thomas’ poems “drew him in with its striking new forms and unerringly popular touch.”
“Do not go gentle into that good night” became a reported favorite:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
‘Be Here Now’ by Ram Dass reportedly transformed Jobs when he was in college.
In late 1972, Jobs had just started at Reed College, an elite liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. He started taking LSD and reading lots of books about spirituality.
“Be Here Now,” a guide to meditation by Ram Dass, affected Jobs greatly. Born Richard Alpert, Dass offers an account of his encounters with South Asian metaphysics:
Now, though I am a beginner on the path, I have returned to the West for a time to work out karma or unfulfilled commitment. Part of this commitment is to share what I have learned with those of you who are on a similar journey … Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.
For me, this story is but a vehicle for sharing with you the true message, the living faith in what is possible.
“It was profound,” Jobs said. “It transformed me and many of my friends.”
Jobs swore off meat after reading ‘Diet for a Small Planet’ by Frances Moore Lappe.
In that first year at Reed, Jobs also read “Diet for a Small Planet,” a book about protein-rich vegetarianism that went on to sell 3 million copies.
It was a breakthrough.
“That’s when I pretty much swore off meat for good,” Jobs told Isaacson.
The book had another effect on Jobs: it gave him permission to experiment with extreme diets like purging or fasting.
Jobs stared juice fasting after reading ‘Mucusless Diet Healing System’ by Arnold Ehret.
But Jobs’ diet grew more adventurous after reading “Muscusless Diet Healing System” by early-20th-century German dietitian Arnold Ehret, who recommended practices like “ intermittent juice fasting.”
“I got into it in my typical nutso way,” Jobs told Isaacson.
After getting to know Ehret’s work, Jobs became something of a nutritional extremist, subsisting on carrots for weeks at a time — to the point that his skin reportedly started turning orange.
But don’t try this at home: Ashton Kutcher tried the all-fruit diet while prepping for his role as Steve Jobs, and it landed him in the hospital.
Jobs read ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ by Paramahansa Yogananda in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Jobs read “Autobiography of a Yogi” by Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda when he was in high school.
Then he reread it while he stayed at a guesthouse in the foothills of the Himalayas in India.
Jobs explained:
There was a copy there of “Autobiography of a Yogi” in English that a previous traveler had left, and I read it several times, because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from village to village and recovered from my dysentery.
Unlike the sickness, the book remained a major part of Jobs’ life. He reread it every year.
Jobs read ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’ by Shunryu Suzuki, and attended classes led by the author.
After Jobs got back from India, his interest in meditation continued to flourish. This is partly thanks to geography (1970s California was the place where Zen Buddhism got its first foothold in America), and Jobs was able to attend classes led by Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who authored “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.”
Like everything else, Jobs went hard into Zen.
“He became really serious and self-important and just generally unbearable,” says Daniel Kottke, his best friend at the time.
“Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since,” Jobs told Isaacson. “At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual adviser urged me to stay here (in California).”
‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ by Clayton M. Christensen taught Jobs how not to get left behind by technology.
Apple made a habit of disrupting itself. The iPhone, for instance, had lots of the features of the iconic iPod, thus rendering the music device obsolete.
Jobs was able to see that that cannibalism was a necessary part of growth, thanks to the “Innovator’s Dilemma” by legendary Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen.
The book posits that companies get ruined by their own success, staying committed to a product even after technology (and customers) move on, like Blockbuster did with physical movie rentals.
Jobs made it clear that the same thing wouldn’t happen to Apple, as he said in his explanation of why it needed to embrace cloud computing:
It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be left behind.
‘Cosmic Consciousness’ by Richard Maurice Bucke inspired Jobs to travel across the globe.
Kottke recently shared a list of the books he and Jobs read around their time at Reed — ones that inspired Jobs’ travels across the globe as well as his professional pursuits.
One of the most influential works on that list is “Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind,” originally published by a Canadian psychiatrist in 1901.
Based on his own supposed experiences with enlightenment, Bucke makes the case for a higher form of consciousness than the normal person possesses. He outlines three forms of consciousness: the simple consciousness of animals and humans; the self-consciousness of humans, which includes reason and imagination; and cosmic consciousness, which transcends factual understanding.
Jobs read ‘The Way of the White Clouds’ by Lama Anagarika Govinda as he started to explore Buddhism.
Buddhism was a tremendous influence in Jobs’ life, and it’s said that Zen philosophy helped inspire the simplistic design of Apple products.
Around the time they were beginning to explore Buddhism, Kottke said he and Jobs read this spiritual autobiography by a Buddhist who was one of the last foreigners to travel through Tibet before the Chinese invasion of 1950. Here the author recounts his experiences learning about Tibetan culture and tradition.
Jobs read ‘Ramakrishna and his Disciples’ by Christopher Isherwood as part of his literary exploration.
Kottke and Jobs’ literary exploration also included this biography of the 19th-century Hindu saint Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, originally published in 1965.
Fans of the book say Isherwood refrains from preaching and from passing judgment on Ramakrishna’s teachings. Instead, he helps readers understand how the saint became so widely influential and revered by taking them on a journey from Ramakrishna’s childhood through his spiritual education.
‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism’ by Chogyam Trungpa taught Jobs that sense of self is an illusion.
This book was among those that Kottke and Jobs read while exploring Buddhist religion and philosophy.
It’s a transcript of two lectures the author gave, between 1970 and 1971, on common traps in spiritual journeys.
The main idea is that the ego, or the sense of self, is only an illusion. Instead of trying toimprove themselves through spirituality, Trungpa urges readers to just let themselves exist.
Jobs read ‘Meetings With Remarkable Men’ by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, another book about a spiritual journey.
On their personal spiritual journeys, Jobs and Kottke derived inspiration from others who had embarked on similar quests for knowledge.
The second volume of the All and Everything trilogy, originally published in 1963, features the author’s recounting of people he met during his travels across Central Asia.
Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher, sought spiritual and existential fulfillment in everyone from his father to a Persian dervish. One reader compares the work to a 20th-century version of the allegory “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Originally published at Business Insider.
More from Business Insider:
11 habits of highly successful people
6 science-backed reasons you keep procrastinating — and what you can do to beat it once and for all
Follow us here and subscribe here for all the latest news on how you can keep Thriving.
Stay up to date or catch-up on all our podcasts with Arianna Huffington here.