Cover of Becoming Steve Jobs

Becoming Steve Jobs

Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

The more useful Jobs is the second one: scarred, focused, still impossible, finally compounding.

The corrective to the caricature: this book tracks what happened between the humiliation of 1985 and the iPhone — the NeXT and Pixar years where the intensity stayed but learned to compound. What founders need is not the intensity itself; it is the conversion of intensity into repeatable operating control.