The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [8]
But they weren’t the same, Dan’l knew. Steve was the kid with all the marbles.
Steve would often talk about “the other Steve,” the character portrayed by the press, as if it were a purely fictional creation. He would say that he only kept from going insane by thinking of his media image as someone else entirely, another person. He sometimes yearned for his lost anonymity. Once, as he walked through Palo Alto, he rushed to help a woman who had fallen on the street. As he reached out his hand, she recognized him and exclaimed: “Oh my God, it’s Steve Jobs!” The episode made him deeply upset. He hated calling attention to himself. He disliked it when the travel agency would send aides in conspicuous yellow jackets to meet him at the airport gate, blatantly signaling that he was some kind of very important person. He began to enjoy walking through the streets of New York City for the surprising anonymity they conferred, if only for an hour or two at a time.
Steve could be charmed and amused when people failed to recognize him. Once at the video rental store in Woodside, the clerk had a newspaper open to a story about Steve Jobs. When the real-life Steve stepped up to pay for a video, he pointed out the article.
“Yeah, he’s a customer here,” the clerk said nonchalantly.
Then he added: “You sort of look like him, but he’s much better looking.”
• • •
IF THE FAME WAS BOTH a blessing and a curse, so was the money.
In the earliest days of Apple, Steve was the ideal person for the challenge of starting a business with hardly any money or experience and few connections. It was a struggle that would reward his scrappy ingenuity and his shocking brazenness. But at Next, the situation was entirely different. Now he had seemingly limitless amounts of his own money to invest. He quickly sold $70 million of his Apple stock, and Susan Barnes put it into short-term Treasury bonds, safe and liquid, ready for him whenever he needed capital. And he had as much time as he wanted to take. His legend ensured that he could recruit people who were exceptionally talented and motivated. His access to the media was unrivaled by any other entrepreneur. This time he had every possible advantage. Paradoxically, that was the hardest obstacle. His personality thrived on scarcity and adversity but struggled with abundance and ease. Obsessive perfectionists are in constant need of severe constraints and hard deadlines. They need strict budgets. They need limits that force them to choose, commit, and move on. Otherwise they can be paralyzed by their powers of self-criticism or, alternately, overwhelmed by the excess of promising ideas that they can envision.
At Apple, his background had prepared him perfectly for running a garage startup deprived of resources. He initially discovered his talent for making money out of nothing when he was growing up in a family that wasn’t poor but never had very much. They didn’t own a color television. His mother, Clara, had to baby-sit other people’s children to pay for Steve’s swimming lessons when he was five years old. Later she worked part-time as a payroll clerk. His father, Paul, was an earnest journeyman, a high school dropout who worked at various times as a machinist, a used-car salesman, a repo man, a real estate broker. Paul Jobs moonlighted by buying old cars and fixing them up. He always had incisive judgment about finding value and getting good deals. He’d muck around junkyards looking for parts he could purchase cheaply. But when it came to selling, Paul had a quaint sense of honor and fairness that bespoke his Midwestern background. He was a good person but not necessarily