What Steve Jobs learned from Shakespeare’s King Lear
- Steve Jobs credits his ascent as a driver of change to a teenage encounter with King Lear.
- The unconventional aspects of Lear were echoed in the “reality-distortion field” at Apple in which the old rules of life were suspended.
- Jobs identified the exceptional potential of specific gadgets. In them, he perceived the same singularity that he had seen in King Lear.
Innovation. That’s what Steve Jobs drove for thirty-five years, from 1976 until his death in 2011. Spotting the potential of the computer mouse, digital animation, and the smartphone, he helped launch Apple’s Macintosh, Pixar’s Toy Story, and the iPhone, inspiring millions to follow his vision for the future: Think Different.
How did Jobs do it? How did he revolutionize tech, not once but continually?
To find out, I visit engineering teams at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. Snooping nosily around their sunny offices, I ask if they can share Jobs’s secret to innovation. In response, they laugh. They tell me that Apple has lost the secret. If I want to find it, I should go read a biography of Jobs. The most useful one, they tell me, is by Walter Isaacson.
Leaving Cupertino, I immerse myself in Isaacson’s biography. It’s rich with extraordinary anecdotes. But its central thesis is the opposite of what I expect. According to Isaacson, Jobs was not himself exceptional. He was a tweaker who made minor mods to other people’s great ideas. There was nothing profoundly inventive about him.
I return to Apple, perplexed. Is it true that Jobs wasn’t an innovator? The engineers shake their heads. No, Jobs really was an innovator. His uniqueness is evident across the stories that Isaacson collected. But somehow, Isaacson failed to spot the exception in the pages that he himself was writing. What went wrong? What did Isaacson miss that Jobs saw?
The mystery’s solution appears early in Isaacson’s biography, during one of its remarkable stories. The story begins when Isaacson asks Jobs to explain how he transformed from a conventional suburban kid to a driver of change. Jobs responds by crediting his teenage encounter with William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Isaacson, naturally, is fascinated: “I asked [Jobs] why he related to King Lear… but he didn’t respond to the connection I was making, so I let it drop.”
Let’s not let it drop. Let’s pick it up, returning to King Lear and exploring why Jobs connected differently to Shakespeare than Isaacson did.
By asking Jobs why he “related” to King Lear, Isaacson reveals that he himself reads Shakespeare as a source of relatable characters, people with whom we have something in common. This way of reading Shakespeare isn’t unusual; it’s how we’re taught to study literature in school. School approaches literature through logic, and logic has a specific tool for analyzing literature: interpretation.
Interpretation treats literature as a set of symbols, or in other words, representations. This is because logic thinks in equations, which is another way of saying identities; and also because logic thinks in abstractions, which is another way of saying commonalities. If you put identities and commonalities together, you get universal characters: the hero, the villain, the joker, the helper, the innovator.
That’s why Isaacson labels King Lear as an archetype of the willful striver — then asks Jobs how he relates to that archetype. When we encounter King Lear outside the classroom, however, we read it differently. Instead of analyzing it for conventional personality types, we’re struck by its wild originality. As another of Jobs’s heroes, Vincent van Gogh, put it: “My God, the beauty of Shakespeare! But of course, reading Shakespeare can make you shocking to others, and without wishing harm, offend society with your unconventionality.”
Unconventionality is the way of Lear. He is not like any king — or any anyone — we’ve seen before. The same goes for the play’s other characters: They’re individual, surprising, unprecedented. And as the play proceeds, those characters commit, ever more intensely, to their peculiarities. Until they crack the world around them, bending reality and revealing the innovative power of the exceptional. This is logic’s opposite. It is leaning into singularity instead of leaning into commonality. It is doubling down on what is unique, not reverting to what is universal.
As another of Jobs’s heroes, Vincent van Gogh, put it: “My God, the beauty of Shakespeare! But of course, reading Shakespeare can make you shocking to others.”
Like van Gogh, Jobs encountered Shakespeare outside the classroom. He read him not for a high school test but out of personal curiosity, so rather than identifying with Lear, he had his eye for anomalies opened. When Jobs saw with that eye, the result was what his Apple colleagues referred to as a “reality-distortion field.” In the field, the old rules of life were suspended while Jobs pushed forward an exception — until it became a new rule.
There are dozens of stories about how Jobs did this. Here’s one I hear from the Cupertino engineers. In 2005, Jobs partnered with Motorola on the ROKR, a candy-bar phone that could download one hundred iTunes songs. The ROKR was a disaster. Barely any sold, and the few that did delivered underwhelming performance: An outdated handset that played a tiny music catalog through a tinny earpiece. The sales data said: Abandon the project. Jobs did the opposite: He doubled down on what was original about the ROKR. While his competitors smirked at the notion of a jukebox mobile, Jobs drove Apple to create the iPhone.
The sales data said: Abandon the project. Jobs did the opposite: He doubled down on what was original.
What Isaacson saw as Jobs being a “tweaker” was really Jobs identifying the exceptional potential of specific gadgets. In them, he perceived the same singularity that he had seen in King Lear. And just as Shakespeare relentlessly intensified Lear’s individuality, so did Jobs make each gadget more itself, eschewing generic compromise to magnify exceptionality.
The Cupertino engineers tell me that Apple has forgotten this imaginative method. Instead of accelerating the singular, the company’s leadership is doing like Isaacson and cogitating in logic. Logic detects patterns and refines them, mistaking iteration for innovation. In Apple’s case, the iterative refinements have been to prestige TV, headset VR, and generative AI. All have been touted as revolutionary. Yet all have been probabilistic — and thus predictable. Which is why they have failed to break reality like Lear.
If you want, however, you can rediscover what Jobs learned from Shakespeare, bringing back the genius of continual innovation. For a comprehensive guide, see my book Primal Intelligence, but as a quick start, cast your eyes around for something (or someone) weird, irregular, anomalous. Then, rather than interpreting that exception logically like you learned in school, look at it with van Gogh’s eyes. Amplify the unconventional. Shock Silicon Valley. Think different.
