Steve Jobs: 15 books he found ideas and inspiration in
- Why Steve Jobs travelled the world, didn’t eat meat, searched for enlightenment and cannibalised his own products can all be traced to books he read
- From ‘King Lear’ to ‘Atlas Shrugged’, here are 15 books that had a profound effect on his life
Why did Apple “think different”? As Steve Jobs said while introducing the iPad, the firm 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.
By combining the two, 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 said.
Jobs arrived at that perspective through a lifetime of reading, as reviewed in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography and other places. Here’s a breakdown of 15 books that inspired him.
“I started to listen to music a whole lot [in the last two years of high school] and I started to read more outside of just science and technology – Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear,” Jobs told Isaacson.
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 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.