What Steve Jobs learned from Shakespeare’s King Lear
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Angus Fletcher explores how Steve Jobs credited Shakespeare’s King Lear with teaching him a radical approach to innovation—one that amplifies exceptions rather than conforming to patterns. While biographer Walter Isaacson dismissed Jobs as merely a “tweaker” of existing ideas, Fletcher argues that Isaacson missed the crucial insight: Jobs learned from King Lear’s singularity to double down on what makes products exceptional, creating his famous “reality-distortion field” that bent conventional wisdom.
The article contrasts two approaches to reading literature and innovation. Traditional logical interpretation seeks universal patterns and relatable archetypes, while Jobs’s approach—inspired by Shakespeare—embraced unconventionality and individuality. Fletcher uses the iPhone’s development as evidence: when the Motorola ROKR failed, sales data suggested abandoning the project, but Jobs intensified its unique features instead. Apple’s current struggles, Fletcher suggests, stem from abandoning this method in favor of predictable, pattern-based refinement.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Shakespeare as Innovation Teacher
Jobs credited his teenage encounter with King Lear as transformative, teaching him to embrace singularity over conventional thinking.
Isaacson’s Misinterpretation
The biographer dismissed Jobs as a tweaker, missing that Jobs identified and amplified exceptional potential in specific technologies.
Reality-Distortion Field
Jobs’s colleagues described his method as bending reality by suspending old rules and pushing exceptions until they became new paradigms.
The iPhone Origin Story
After the failed Motorola ROKR, Jobs doubled down on its unique music-phone concept rather than abandoning it, creating the iPhone.
Logic Versus Singularity
Traditional logical interpretation seeks universal patterns and archetypes, while Jobs’s approach amplified unconventional, individual characteristics.
Apple’s Lost Method
Current Apple leadership has abandoned Jobs’s approach, favoring predictable pattern-refinement in prestige TV, VR headsets, and generative AI.
Master Reading Comprehension
Practice with 365 curated articles and 2,400+ questions across 9 RC types.
Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Amplifying Exceptions Over Pattern-Matching
Steve Jobs’s innovation methodology came from Shakespeare’s King Lear, which taught him to intensify singular, exceptional qualities rather than conform to universal patterns or logical refinements. This approach created breakthrough products by bending reality around what made technologies uniquely different, not what made them conventionally similar.
Purpose
Correcting Misunderstandings About Innovation
Fletcher aims to challenge Walter Isaacson’s biographical assessment of Jobs and reveal the true source of his innovation. By analyzing Jobs’s relationship with King Lear, Fletcher argues that genuine innovation requires embracing unconventionality and singularity rather than iterative refinement of existing patterns.
Structure
Mystery → Investigation → Revelation
The article follows a detective story structure: presenting the mystery of Jobs’s innovation at Apple headquarters, investigating through Isaacson’s biography and the King Lear connection, contrasting logical versus singular approaches to reading and innovation, then revealing how this method created the iPhone and critiquing Apple’s current direction.
Tone
Investigative, Reverent & Critical
Fletcher adopts a curious, detective-like tone while investigating Jobs’s methods, shows deep respect for both Jobs and Shakespeare’s unconventional thinking, and delivers pointed criticism toward both Isaacson’s interpretation and Apple’s current leadership for abandoning the exceptional-amplification approach.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
Click each card to reveal the definition
Build your vocabulary systematically
Each article in our course includes 8-12 vocabulary words with contextual usage.
Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
Tap each card to flip and see the definition
The quality of being unusual or extraordinary; possessing characteristics that deviate significantly from the norm in remarkable ways.
“Jobs make each gadget more itself, eschewing generic compromise to magnify exceptionality.”
Completely baffled or confused; unable to understand something that seems contradictory or puzzling.
“I return to Apple, perplexed. Is it true that Jobs wasn’t an innovator?”
Never done or known before; without previous example or parallel in history.
“The play’s other characters: They’re individual, surprising, unprecedented.”
The quality of not conforming to accepted standards, traditions, or established practices; being radically different or unusual.
“Reading Shakespeare can make you shocking to others, and without wishing harm, offend society with your unconventionality.”
To make something appear larger or more important; to intensify or amplify certain characteristics or qualities.
“Jobs make each gadget more itself, eschewing generic compromise to magnify exceptionality.”
Persistently and unceasingly; continuing in a determined way without becoming weaker or giving up.
“Just as Shakespeare relentlessly intensified Lear’s individuality, so did Jobs make each gadget more itself.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, Walter Isaacson’s biography successfully identified the true source of Steve Jobs’s innovation.
2What does the author mean by Jobs’s “reality-distortion field”?
3Which sentence best captures the contrast between Isaacson’s and Jobs’s approaches to reading King Lear?
4Based on the article, determine if each statement is true or false:
The Motorola ROKR was a failed product that could download one hundred iTunes songs.
Current Apple leadership has successfully maintained Jobs’s innovation methodology.
Vincent van Gogh warned that reading Shakespeare could make one unconventional and shocking to society.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be inferred about Fletcher’s view of how schools teach literature?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
The reality-distortion field was Jobs’s method of suspending conventional rules and pushing exceptional ideas forward until they became new industry standards. Rather than accepting existing limitations, Jobs would intensify what made a product unique until it transformed how people thought about technology entirely—bending reality around the exception rather than conforming to established patterns.
The ROKR was a failed candy-bar phone that could download one hundred iTunes songs but delivered poor performance. While sales data suggested abandoning the project and competitors dismissed the concept of a jukebox mobile, Jobs identified the exceptional potential in combining music and phone technology. He doubled down on what was original about the ROKR—its singular music-phone integration—and intensified that quality to create the iPhone.
Amplifying the unconventional means intensifying what makes something uniquely different rather than smoothing it into generic patterns. Just as Shakespeare made King Lear more intensely himself—doubling down on his peculiarities until they cracked reality—Jobs made each gadget “more itself” by magnifying its exceptional qualities instead of compromising toward conventional expectations. This approach creates revolutionary breakthroughs rather than iterative refinements.
Readlite provides curated articles with comprehensive analysis including summaries, key points, vocabulary building, and practice questions across 9 different RC question types. Our Ultimate Reading Course offers 365 articles with 2,400+ questions to systematically improve your reading comprehension skills.
This article is rated Intermediate. It requires understanding abstract concepts like singularity versus universality, follows a non-linear investigative structure, and uses sophisticated vocabulary while remaining accessible. The article demands inference skills to connect Jobs’s reading of King Lear to his innovation methodology, making it ideal for readers developing advanced analytical reading abilities without requiring specialized background knowledge.
Fletcher brings a literary and cognitive perspective that challenges the dominant biographical narrative. By examining Jobs through the lens of how he read Shakespeare, Fletcher reveals an innovation methodology that Walter Isaacson missed despite writing Jobs’s authorized biography. Fletcher’s analysis from his book Primal Intelligence connects literary interpretation methods to business innovation, offering Apple engineers themselves a framework for understanding what made Jobs exceptional.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
