What Donald Trump can learn from Steve Jobs

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A mercurial and brash narcissist with a propensity to bend the truth. That’s how people close to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (1955-2011) described him.

Such foibles contributed to his ouster from the company in 1985 amid a power struggle with its board. But 12 years later, after Apple had lost its way, Jobs returned to serve as CEO and led the company to its best days. His comeback and successes offer lessons for Donald Trump.

Like the president-elect, Jobs adhered to crazy ideas. During his 20s, according to a 2011 biography by Walter Isaacson, he “clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use deodorant or shower regularly." Jobs’s colleagues described his propensity to ignore and twist the truth to his own ends as a “reality distortion field." “He would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without even considering the truth," Mr. Isaacson writes.

A more egregious example: Jobs denied being the father of his daughter Lisa for many years. “He can deceive himself," former Apple engineer Bill Atkinson told Mr. Isaacson.

“It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it." On the other hand, Jobs “also indulged in being brutally honest at times, telling the truths that most of us sugarcoat or suppress. Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn’t apply to him," Mr. Isaacson writes.