For a generation, Steve Jobs was the figure in the black turtleneck on the keynote stage, holding up a rectangle he was about to convince you was the future. His colleagues had a name for his charisma: “the reality-distortion field.” It was his ability to convince a room that an impossible deadline was reachable or that a failing product was on the verge of greatness.
Jobs’s life has been told countless times. The authorized version goes like this: in 1985, he was driven out of Apple, the company he’d co-founded nine years earlier out of his parents’ garage, idled about for 12 years at NeXT, the start-up he built to sell powerful computers to universities, and returned to Apple in 1997 to save the company from bankruptcy. What surprised me while writing my biography of Jobs, Steve Jobs in Exile, is that those 12 lost years at NeXT forged the figure on the keynote stage. It was where Jobs learned, finally, to trust the people around him—and where he built the comeback that would make him a legend.
