People read biographies for different reasons. Out of admiration and curiosity, peer pressure and scholarship, empathy and antagonism but under it all lies the basic all -consuming question: how did this person live his life, what can I learn from it that will teach me to live mine?
And so even as the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson was mined for ever more detail to buttress the mythology around the icon, his story was being read as a morality tale. And for many the takeaway was the astonishingly constructive effect that dissonance and chaos have on a person’s life.
Perhaps Jobs would not have been half the man he was if it were not for the inconsistency that his life was. Perhaps only from the cauldron of contradiction could an idea as big as Apple be created.
Consider the facts: an abandoned child at birth, adopted by parents who made him feel special and loved. A college drop out consumed by the quest for knowledge. A person on the cutting edge of a new science, given to following obscure and eccentric lifestyle choice; a highly evolved and sensitive Buddhist known for his churlishness and random cruelty; an icon who gave the world so many elegant and exquisitely designed products and who used to offend people with his body odour and his lack of personal hygiene; a visionary geek who was one of the best salesman of the 21st century, and a counterculture radical acid- dropping pot- smoking hippy who created one of the world’s most valued and admired businesses.
Perhaps Jobs’ life will serve as a reminder that it is these incongruities and inconsistencies that create the friction so necessary in life to achieve brilliance. Perhaps more than his advertising campaigns that extolled people to ‘ Think Different’, Jobs’ own life will be the concept’s greatest poster boy. Perhaps ‘run of the mill’, ‘status quo’, ‘anodyne’ and ‘ confirming’ will be values that are finally put to rest. Perhaps the time has come for those who stand at an angle to the rest of the world to be recognised as civilisation’s frontrunners. And perhaps no one will dare ignore that pesky kid with the weird idea.
The products of unorthodox and unconventional approaches and backgrounds have many advocates in our times: the President of the United States, arguably the world’s most powerful man, like Jobs, is the product of a broken home and mixed racial parentage. The most powerful revolutionary who overthrew a colonial empire in the subcontinent was a frail, unarmed man who preached non-violence and spirituality; some of the most respected and admired writers today like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy have been born in nations where English is not the first language, and in fact have adhered to no principles of the Queen’s language. And whether you agree with him or not, can you really claim to be unimpressed by the irony of a dhoti-clad septuagenarian, who in a nation of consumers and the Coca-Cola generation, has captured center stage with his anti-corruption and anti-establishment rhetoric?
There have always been those who have seen the wisdom of following their heart, their inner voice, and their own beliefs regardless of whether or not they fit in with the crowd. But if Jobs’ life serves as anything it will be for the realisation that marching to your own drumbeat is the best way to live.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com