Mark: Most people think they know Steve Jobs: the brilliant, tyrannical genius in the black turtleneck. But what if the most important part of his story isn't the soaring success of the iPhone, but the crushing failures that came before it? Michelle: Exactly. The common narrative tends to skip over his "wilderness years"—that decade he was exiled from Apple—treating it like a footnote. But the book we're diving into today, Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, makes a radical claim: it argues those years are everything. Mark: It's a fascinating premise. The book suggests that the stinging reversals, the bad judgment calls, and what it calls "the whole Pandora's box of immaturity" were actually the necessary prerequisites for the visionary leader who returned to save Apple. It’s not about celebrating success; it’s about understanding how failure forges greatness. Michelle: It’s a story of transformation, not just triumph. And that's what we want to explore. Mark: So today, we're going to unpack this transformation from three angles. First, we'll meet the arrogant, flawed genius of early Apple to establish a baseline. Then, we'll journey into his 'wilderness university' at NeXT and Pixar to see how failure became his greatest teacher. Michelle: And finally, we'll witness the return of the master, a changed man who would go on to apply these hard-won lessons to change the world. It’s a much more human, and frankly, more useful story than the myth of the infallible genius.

Michelle: So, to really appreciate the transformation, Mark, we have to start at the beginning. We need to understand the baseline. What did that early, 'un-transformed' Steve Jobs actually look like? Mark: That's the perfect question, because the book gives us this incredible, almost cinematic snapshot of him at 24 years old. It’s 1979, and the story is known as the "Garden of Allah" incident. Jobs is fresh from a frustrating Apple board meeting, and he drives his Mercedes to a retreat center in Marin County. He's there to meet with the Seva Foundation, a group trying to eliminate blindness in India. Michelle: And this isn't just any group. We're talking about luminaries like the spiritual teacher Ram Dass and Larry Brilliant, a renowned epidemiologist. These are serious, accomplished people. Mark: Exactly. And Jobs, all of 24 years old, storms in late. The group is brainstorming marketing ideas, and he immediately dismisses them as naive and inadequate. He gets confrontational, insisting they need to hire his guy, the marketing guru Regis McKenna. He's completely ignoring the incredible expertise in the room. Larry Brilliant asks him to stop, then asks him again, and finally has to tell him to leave. Michelle: So he gets kicked out of a humanitarian meeting for being a jerk. That sounds about right for the cliché of young Steve Jobs. Mark: But here's where the story gets its depth. A little while later, Larry Brilliant goes out to the parking lot and finds Steve Jobs, the future titan of industry, crying in his car. Jobs looks up and says, "I’m sorry. I’m too wound up, I live in two worlds." He then goes back inside, apologizes to the entire group, and leaves. Michelle: Wow. That story is the perfect microcosm of the early Jobs. The brilliance is there—he's probably right that their marketing ideas were amateurish—but it's wrapped in this abrasive, impatient, socially inept package. He has zero ability to read the room or modulate his behavior. Mark: And that internal conflict he mentioned, "I live in two worlds," is so telling. He's torn between his counter-culture ideals and his burgeoning, ruthless business ambition. Michelle: And it’s that uncontrolled, raw nature that defined his first tenure at Apple. It wasn't just a personality quirk; it had real-world consequences. This is the same guy who would deny paternity of his daughter, Lisa, for years, a truly reprehensible act that showed a profound lack of empathy. Mark: Absolutely. And it bled directly into his professional life. Take the Apple III, the intended successor to the wildly successful Apple II. Jobs became obsessed with the aesthetics, particularly making the machine silent. He demanded the engineers remove the cooling fan. Michelle: A decision that sounds elegant on paper, but in reality? Mark: It was a catastrophe. The computers overheated so badly that the chips would literally pop out of their sockets. Apple had to tell customers to lift their computers six inches and drop them to reseat the chips. The Apple III was an unmitigated commercial failure, and it was a direct result of Jobs's arrogance and his refusal to listen to his own engineers. Michelle: So you have this pattern: a brilliant insight, like the need for better marketing or a sleeker design, completely derailed by his own immaturity and inability to collaborate. He was a visionary who couldn't get out of his own way. And ultimately, that's why he was forced out of the company he created. He was a problem that Apple, at that time, didn't know how to solve. Mark: Exactly. He was ousted from the Lisa project, the precursor to the Mac, for the same reasons. He was brilliant, but he was also a breakdown waiting to happen. And that sets the stage for the most important period of his life: his exile.

Mark: And that lack of control, that raw immaturity, is exactly what he takes with him when he leaves Apple. This brings us to the most critical part of his journey, what the authors call his "wilderness years." This is where he supposedly fails, but in reality, learns everything. Michelle: This is the part of the story that most biographies just gloss over. He starts NeXT, it doesn't do well. He buys Pixar, it struggles for years. It's seen as a period of wandering in the desert. But this book argues it was his real-world MBA. Mark: A very, very expensive MBA. And to see the change, you just have to look at how he handled high-stakes negotiations. At NeXT, he lands a potentially company-saving deal with IBM. They agree to license his NeXTSTEP operating system for $60 million—critical cash for the struggling company. Michelle: This should have been a massive win. A partnership with the biggest computer company in the world. Mark: It should have been. But the old Steve Jobs shows up to the negotiation. The book describes him as displaying a "juvenile mix of hubris and uncertainty." In one meeting with a room full of IBM executives who had flown out to see him, he walks in late and his opening line is, "Your user interface sucks." Michelle: (Laughs) That is not a recommended negotiating tactic. Mark: Not at all. His own head of sales, Dan'l Lewin, said he would literally kick Jobs under the table to get him to stop undermining their own strategy. Jobs overplayed his hand, demanded more money, and was so difficult to work with that the IBM executive, James Cannavino, eventually just stopped taking his calls. The deal just fizzled out and died. It was a fatal blow to NeXT's hardware ambitions. Michelle: Okay, so hold that image in your mind: the arrogant, deal-killing Steve Jobs at NeXT. Now, let's fast forward a few years. It's 1997. He's still in the wilderness, but Pixar, his other venture, has a massive hit with Toy Story. The problem is, their original deal with Disney is terrible. They only get about 12.5% of the box office profits. Mark: And he's negotiating with Michael Eisner, the notoriously tough CEO of Disney, a man Jobs would later describe as "evil." The old Jobs would have gone in with guns blazing, made arrogant demands, and probably blown up the relationship for good. Michelle: But the new Jobs, the one who has been humbled by NeXT, does something completely different. Mark, how did he approach this negotiation? Mark: It was a masterclass in strategic patience. He had learned from his failures. First, he coolly and accurately assessed the landscape. He knew that Jeffrey Katzenberg had left Disney to start DreamWorks, creating a talent war. He knew John Lasseter, Pixar's creative genius, was the hottest director in animation. He had leverage. Michelle: So he didn't just storm in with demands. He understood the other side's position and their fears. Mark: Precisely. And instead of just asking for more money, he reframed the entire relationship. He told Eisner that he wanted Pixar to be treated as a peer to Disney's own legendary animation studio. It was an audacious, aspirational claim for a company that had only made one movie. Michelle: That's the old Jobs's verbal mastery, but now it's backed by real strategy, not just ego. Mark: And it worked. He secured a new five-movie deal with a 50/50 profit split. It was a deal that nobody in Hollywood thought was possible. It's a night-and-day difference from the IBM debacle. At NeXT, he was a gifted amateur. But at Pixar, he was forced to learn. He couldn't be the product guy; he didn't know how to make animated movies. He had to learn to be a mentor, a protector of creative culture, and a patient strategist. Michelle: It's like NeXT was the school of hard knocks that taught him what not to do, and Pixar, by forcing him to be a hands-off mentor to geniuses like Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, taught him how to manage genius instead of just being one. Those were the two missing pieces of his education. Mark: And with that education complete, he was finally ready to go back to Apple.

Michelle: So he's been forged in this fire of failure and mentorship. He returns to Apple in 1997, and let's be clear, the company is on life support. It was reportedly 90 days from bankruptcy. And one of the first, most critical tasks he faces is making a deal with his ultimate rival, Bill Gates. Mark: This was an existential threat. Microsoft was considering dropping support for its Office suite on the Mac. If that happened, the Mac would become irrelevant in business and education overnight. It would have been a death blow. The previous CEO, Gil Amelio, had been stuck in these convoluted, endless negotiations with Gates for months, getting nowhere. Michelle: And this is where we see the fully formed, mature Steve Jobs in action. He doesn't get bogged down in the details. He simplifies. Mark: He does. And we have this incredible quote directly from Bill Gates in the book, reflecting on the difference. Gates says, "Gil was complicated... he wanted six things, most of which were not important. When Steve comes in, he looks at the deal and says, 'Here are the two things I want, and here's what you clearly want from us.' And we had the deal done very quickly." Michelle: That is so powerful. Simplicity. He cut right through all the noise. He understood the core of the issue for both sides. He wasn't just negotiating a list of features; he was negotiating the survival of his company. Mark: And he did something truly brilliant. He didn't just ask Gates to continue making Office for Mac. He asked—no, he demanded—that Microsoft make a $150 million investment in Apple. Michelle: Which was genius. It wasn't about the money, which Apple desperately needed. It was about the signal it sent to the world. It was a public vote of confidence from their biggest competitor. It told developers, customers, and Wall Street that Apple was back and had a future. Mark: This wasn't the rash kid who blew the IBM deal. This was a strategic leader who understood the entire chessboard. He had learned to turn rivals into partners when necessary. He had learned that sometimes the best way to win is to make sure the other side wins too. Michelle: And this new maturity is what allowed him to build the team and the culture that would produce the string of hits that we all know: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. He learned to delegate, something the old Jobs was terrible at. Ron Johnson, the man he hired to create the Apple Stores, said, "Steve was the best delegator I ever met. He was so clear about what he wanted that it gave you great freedom." Mark: That clarity came from his trials. He had failed enough to know exactly what mattered. He focused on the "whole widget"—the seamless integration of hardware, software, and services—because he had seen at NeXT what happens when you only focus on one piece of the puzzle. He learned to be patient, waiting for technologies like multi-touch to mature before launching the iPhone, a stark contrast to his rush to get the flawed Apple III out the door. Michelle: And he did all of this while facing his own mortality. His cancer diagnosis in 2003 only sharpened his focus. It gave him an urgency, a profound sense that his time was limited and he couldn't waste it on trivialities. Mark: It’s a powerful arc. The book makes it clear that the second coming of Steve Jobs wasn't a miracle. It was earned. It was paid for with a decade of public and private failure.

Mark: So, when you step back and look at the whole story presented in Becoming Steve Jobs, the picture that emerges is not of a genius who was always right. It's a much more compelling story of a flawed, brilliant upstart who was forced, through painful experience, to learn from his mistakes. Michelle: Absolutely. The wilderness years weren't a detour; they were the path. His failures at NeXT and his forced patience at Pixar were the very experiences that tempered his arrogance, taught him strategy, and gave him the wisdom to lead Apple's incredible renaissance. Mark: He had to be broken down before he could be built back up, stronger and more focused than ever. The book's core idea is that we learn as much, if not more, from our failures and dead ends as we do from our successes. Michelle: And that really leaves us with a powerful question to think about in our own lives. We live in a culture that is so obsessed with celebrating success and hiding failure. We curate our lives on social media to show only the wins. But this story suggests we have it all backward. Mark: It’s a profound thought. Michelle: Maybe the most important question we can ask ourselves isn't 'How can I succeed?' or 'How can I avoid failure?' but rather, 'What are my failures trying to teach me?' If we can answer that, we might just be on the path to becoming the best version of ourselves.