The genius of Steve Jobs
He had intuition and imagination,worth far more than analytical ability
One of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface,this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really,really smart. After all,he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.
But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas,with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time,and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds. But then something else occurred to me: Gates never made the iPod. Instead,he made the Zune.
So was Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead,he was a genius. His success dramatises an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive,unexpected,and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition,not analytic rigour. Trained in Zen Buddhism,Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition,in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said,“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Einstein is,of course,the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré,for example,first came up with some of the components of special relativity,and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories. Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius,which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently. When assessing a theory,he would ask himself,Is this the way that God would design the universe?
Jobs’s genius wasn’t,as even his fanboys admit,in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart,but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction,I think,is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge. In the world of invention and innovation,that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology,poetry to processors. This was Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid,but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes,Edwin Land of Polaroid,said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences,and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”
America’s advantage,if it continues to have one,will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative,those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation,as Steve Jobs’s career showed.
Isaacson is the author of ‘Steve Jobs’
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