16. Isaacson writes: "In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church's pastor, 'If I raise my finger, will God know which one I'm going to raise even before I do it?'

5. "The conversation I'm going to have with my parents now that I've turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job," he said.

4. Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

3. Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

2. The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24 , a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean's award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a resume and cover letter - four or five a week, week after week.

1.GRAFTON, Mass. —After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home.

60. As I read this biography of Jobs, I wanted to see how a man dealt with his own brokenness and defects. I wanted to see what the good and the bad looked like in organizational leadership. I wanted to learn what's possible when someone - whatever the reason—reaches for their notion

59. "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life," he said. "Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."

58. Once in a commencement address at Stanford, Jobs told graduates that death may be life's greatest gift in that a true respect for death might force one to give his/her best in every waking day.

57. "I am about fifty-fifty on believing in God," he told Isaacson not long before he died. "For most of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye ... I'd like to think that something survives after you die. It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures. But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch. Click! And you're gone. Maybe that's why I never like to put on-off switches on Apple devices. "

56. When Steve Jobs discovered that he had cancer, typically he tried to manage his own healing process. There were some bad decisions that frustrated his doctors. But there were also good choices that apparently advanced the process of seeking a cure for cancer. But in the end, he lost this last battle and died.