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The Volatile Visionary: A Personality Assessment of Steve Jobs

Milan Kordestani
September 11, 2025
Milan Kordestani

Milan Kordestani is an LA-based best-selling author exploring the frontiers of psychological science.

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“While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”  Apple’s “Think Different” Commercial (1997)

As a kid growing up in Silicon Valley, I remember how, when Steve Jobs got on stage to announce a new Apple product, it felt like the world would stop. Tech fans held their breath and listened to each new note, showing reverence reserved for the speeches of Popes and presidents. Jobs gave off the energy of a guru, and the charisma to match. He promised innovation, clean design, flawless user interfaces, and time and time again, he and his teams would deliver. By founding and running Apple, he changed the way we worked at home, listened to music, and communicated. Steve Jobs altered the trajectory of humanity’s technological progress, declaring that “some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do,” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 567). This forward-thinking approach would be a hallmark of Jobs’s legendary legacy of creativity, drive, and imagination.

But, of course, that is only half the story. Steve Jobs was such a volatile, difficult individual that the CEO he had appointed to helm Apple fired him from the company in 1985 because of personality clashes (Blumenthal, 2012, p. 127). Jobs famously disavowed his own daughter Lisa, denying their connection even after a court-ordered paternity test (Schlender and Tetzeli, 2016, p. 63), but then named a computer after her without her consent (Isaacson, 2011, p. 93). Argumentative, bombastic, and prone to rambling about Eastern philosophy, Jobs gained a reputation for being one of the most difficult figures in the history of Silicon Valley. Even at his death from cancer in 2011, which was treated with rock-star reverence at the global level, Jobs’s acerbic nature was a topic of discussion.

Simply put: the only thing that ever limited Steve Jobs’s genius during his lifetime was his personality. 

Jobs is thus a worthy character to analyze using various psychological approaches to personality. In fact, one approach is not enough alone to address the complexity of Jobs’s enigmatic and at times highly self-distructive personality. In this article, I’ll apply three core approaches to the psychology of personality to analyzing the personality of Steve Jobs: a psychodynamic analysis of the impact of his early adoption on his personality and behavior; a discussion of Jobs’s notorious ‘reality distortion field’ within the context of Social-Cognitive theory; and a phenomenological/humanistic reading of Jobs’s remarkable “make a little dent in the universe” (Sheff, 1985, p. 58) perspective. By utilizing each approach, I’ll demonstrate how Jobs’s personality was a necessary part of his genius, even as he struggled to relate to the world and to those directly around him. 

Psychodynamic Perspective: The Impact of Early Adoption

“Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was.” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 4)

One of the most central stories in Steve Jobs’s life began even before his birth. When Steve’s mother was pregnant, she decided not to keep the baby and found a family to adopt him. However, that family had hoped for a girl, and rejected Steve at birth. Instead, Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple living in Mountain View, California offered to adopt him, but his birth mother refused when she found out that neither of the Jobs were college graduates. Steve’s biological mother only agreed to let the Jobs family adopt him on the condition that they would save their entire lives to send him to college. 

This story appears in every biography of Jobs, and was also a topic he discussed in interviews. It was one of three central anecdotes in his 2005 Stanford graduation speech. There, he explained, “and 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford. And all of my working class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was, spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life,” (Jobs, 2005). Though he would succeed wildly on his own, the risk was situated within the context of his unique adoption situation and his sense of obligation–maybe even destiny–to complete college.

Jobs’s biographer details the direct impact Jobs’s adoption had on his life. “His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 4). According to longtime colleague, Del Yocam, “I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth. He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself,” (quoted in Isaacson, 2011, p. 5). Greg Calhoun, who befriended Jobs in their early twenties, also commented on the psychological effect of the adoption. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused. It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into,” (quoted in Isaacson, 2011, p. 4-5).

Unpacking this core story requires a psychological theory of personality that focuses on childhood trauma, catharsis, and the challenge of the ego: psychodynamic theory. Theorists of this approach to personality, including Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, and Eric Erikson, each tried to explain the nature of our behaviour and emotions with their own approaches to growth and change (Cervone and Pervin, 2018, p. 53-126). Psychodynamists argue that early childhood experiences of the developing individual are important, as they shape the person for many years. Early childhood experiences shape the ego, id, and superego, laying the foundation for the unconscious drives that exert a powerful influence on our behavior without our awareness. These drives, often stemming from unresolved conflicts, can manifest subtly in our daily lives.

We can thus look at Jobs’s 2005 Stanford Commencement speech as a form of catharsis, a term developed by psychoanalysts Breuer and Freud to describe a coping mechanism to childhood trauma. Cervone and Pervin explain that, “catharsis refers to a release and freeing of emotions by talking about one's problems” (2018, p. 57). By reframing his failure to graduate college into a success story while giving a keynote speech on the stage of his industry’s greatest college, he was finally able to reject his birth mother’s rejection and justify his adoptive parents’ support. The fact that he so openly discussed this painful topic with friends, interviewers, and the graduating class of Stanford illustrates the psychodynamic tool of catharsis as a tool of healing and personality development.

Psychodynamic theory also invites us to explore the ego, id, and superego. Freud posited that our personality consists of a dynamic between three elements of the human psyche: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the primitive part of our personality that is driven by instinct and seeks instant gratification. On the other hand, the “superego contains ideals for which we strive, as well as ethical standards that will cause us to feel guilt if we violate them. The superego, then, is an internal representation of the moral rules of the external, social world” (Cervone and Pervin, 2018, p. 67). Finally, the ego is governed by the reality principle and works to realistically and acceptably satisfy the demands of the id and superego. Jobs’ unwillingness to accept reality in many cases, from her personal rejection of his daughter to his fanatical devotion to clean product design, were often coupled with a marked lack of guilt or conscience, bringing in to question whether his childhood adoption and rejection skewed his ability to build a healthy ego, instead letting his superego to morph into an unhealthy sense of self.

Certainly, concerns about the public narrative of one’s own life require a strong sense of self: Jobs was plagued by fears of his legacy being misunderstood. In a last-ditch effort to help his children learn about him before his own death, Jobs asked one of the world’s leading historians, Walter Isaacson, to write his biography (2011). Knowing how he was often mischaracterized, Jobs explained to Isaacson, “I realized other people would write about me if I died, and they wouldn’t know anything. They’d get it all wrong. So I wanted to make sure someone heard what I had to say” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 556). While Jobs’s superego, a powerful force for perfection in his life, wanted his story told accurately, in this case, his ego allowed him to see the reality of his story. This kind of self-reflection makes sense for someone still relatively young if one considers the context of his battle with cancer and his Eastern philosophical understandings of suffering and death.

Throughout his career and for years after, Steve Jobs’s ego was the subject of public debate (Holiday, 2016), but this is more the colloquial understanding of the term. I would argue that it is because Jobs’ superego was so willing to supersede the rules of reality that he was successful. Impossible demands? Imagine going farther. Conflicts over ideas? Push back harder. Driven by a childhood narrative of being chosen to do something better, and embracing his own life experiences, Jobs’s unchecked superego allowed him to innovate in incomparable ways, while also damaging personal and professional relationships at every stage. In fact, it led him to develop a powerful personality trait that would shape the future of technology: the reality distortion field.

Social-Cognitive Perspective: The Power of the Reality Distortion Field

“The unified field theory that ties together Jobs’s personality and products begins with his most salient trait: his intensity.” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 561)

One of the most unique creations of Steve Jobs–not the technology he inspired, but a mindset he embodied–was known as his ‘reality distortion field.’ The term is associated with Jobs’s colleague Bud Tribble, who first used the term in 1981. According to Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson, “at first [Andy] Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of working with Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” he said,” (Isaacson, 2011, p. 118). A mix of charisma, infectious enthusiasm, and addictive co-ambition, this ‘reality distortion field’ was part manipulative tactic, part powerful manifestation of Jobs’s incredibly persuasive self-efficacy, where his belief in what was possible became so potent that it influenced the beliefs and actions of those around him. It is this reality distortion field that requires a new theoretical approach to Jobs’s personality development: the social-cognitive approach.

Jobs would use his reality field to push workers beyond the brink, to argue against designers who mentioned limits, and to make stressful demands on production capabilities. Author Karen Blumenthal further elaborates on this, stating, "at various points, Jobs’s reality distortion field would lead him to act as if the rules of life didn’t apply to him... People would believe him when he was around and only come to their senses after he left. But because he pushed so hard, sometimes they made the impossible come true” (2012, p. 107-108). This illustrates his high self-efficacy—his unwavering belief in his own ideas and capabilities, even in the face of widespread doubt. The reality distortion field combined his charismatic communication with unprecedented self-efficacy, allowing Jobs to literally alter the perceived reality for others, leading to unprecedented achievements.

A central application of social-cognitive theory is self-efficacy and the ability to believe in oneself and one’s ideas will be successful, even in the face of doubt (Bandura, 1977). Cervone and Pervin note that, “perceived self‐efficacy, then, refers to people's perceptions of their own capabilities for action in future situations” (2018, p. 337). Jobs’s conviction in his vision for products like the Macintosh, the iPod, or the iPhone, often stood against the advice of engineers, marketers, and even company executives. In fact, “Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before,” (Schlender and Tetzeli, 2016, p. 38). This speaks to his high outcome expectancies and willingness to act on internal convictions, even when external validation was absent, a hallmark of powerful self-efficacy in action. His perseverance and dedication to his reality distortion field are prime examples of exceptionally high self-efficacy. 

Putting Jobs’s self-efficacy into a larger discussion of social-cognitive theory further illustrates the reciprocal nature of his reality distortion field on modern computing and technology. It is interesting that the social-cognitive theory I’m applying here was pioneered by Albert Bandura in the 1970s and 80s, just as Jobs was changing the world of personal computing. Social-cognitive theory focuses on reciprocal determinism, which is the dynamic understanding of personality as largely learned and shaped by interactions among the person, their behavior, and their environment (Cervone and Pervin, 2018, p. 344). Bandura’s discussions of reciprocal determinism emphasizes the importance of observational learning, self-efficacy, outcome expectancies, and personal constructs in shaping an individual's personality (Bandura, 1986). Unlike the internal focus of psychodynamic or humanistic theories, social-cognitive theory highlights how external influences and cognitive processes interact to produce behavior and contribute to personality development. Essentially, “Bandura's principle of reciprocal determinism, then, contends that personality, behavior, and the environment must be understood as a system of forces that mutually influence one another across the course of time” (Cervone and Pervin, 2018, p. 344).

Looking at Steve Jobs’s life, it is easy to see reciprocal determinism at a number of levels. As one of the original power players in a nascent, 1970s Silicon Valley, Jobs was profoundly shaped by the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and 70s, centered in San Francisco and California at large. Past the hippies and gurus lay a world of rapidly evolving tech. He observed, learned from, and was influenced by the innovative spirit, the entrepreneurial drive, and the rebellious ethos that permeated the Valley at the time. According to Isaacson, “he was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business,” (2011, p. 104-5). But, over the long term, this influence was truly reciprocal, as Jobs himself would profoundly shape Silicon Valley and the tech industry itself. He set the tone of “innovation at all costs” for many in tech development. For example, his relentless pursuit of perfection and his insistence on integrating hardware and software for a better user experience would become benchmarks for the entire industry. 

Jobs’s personal constructs, including his unique ways of perceiving and interpreting the world through simplicity and intuition, were not just formed by his environment but actively imposed upon and reshaped it. The application of these constructs was deliberate and measured, as “Steve innately understood from an early age that the right words and stories could help him win the attention he needed to get what he wanted,” (Schlender and Tetzeli, 2016, p. 28). This points to his early mastery of social-cognitive skills, especially the strategic use of communication to influence his environment and achieve desired outcomes. 

Phenomenological Perspective: Making a Little Dent in the Universe

“His mind was never a captive of reality. He possessed an epic sense of possibility.” (Laurene Jobs, Eulogy at Steve Jobs’s funeral, quoted in Isaacson, 2011, p. 576)

Jobs’s epic sense of possibility points to his own highly humanistic approach to philosophy, design, and life itself. In contrast to the determinism of psychodynamic theory or the environmental focus of the social-cognitive approach, the humanistic or phenomenological view stresses the natural tendencies toward growth, self-actualization, appreciation of beauty, and personal meaning. According to humanists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, we have free will and an inherent motivation to develop our individual potential to the fullest. The process of self-actualization (becoming the best we know how to be) causes our desire for congruence between our self-concept and our experience. This perspective views personality as a dynamic process of becoming, driven by an internal compass toward personal growth and authenticity. Carl Rogers theorized that, “the organism has one basic tendency and striving—to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism” (1951, p. 487). As Cervone and Pervin explain, “Rogers proposed that people are motivated toward self‐actualization ‐ a motive toward personal growth, independence, and freedom of expression” (2018, p. 138).

It could also be argued that Jobs’s life, viewed from a humanistic perspective, was a testament to the urge for self-actualization. Just after being driven out of Apple, Jobs commented in a Playboy interview that the greatest pursuit was to “make a little dent in the universe” (Sheff, 1985, p. 58). This was a call to manifest change, to rewrite destiny, and to improve the lives of others. This motivational mantra, which he would return to many times in his career, drove him past the point of exhaustion, and even seemed to haunt him toward the end of his life as he battled cancer. His drive to innovate beyond what was “possible” could be seen as the natural manifestation of this unique potential. 

Along the way, Jobs’s rebellious nature, disdain for conventional thinking, and endless belief in those who “Think Different” epitomized his humanistic commitment to authenticity and true self. That charismatic pursuit of superiority inspired others. For example, while giving a talk to his design team during a company event, Jobs wrote on a board, ““It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy,” implying that his rebellious group’s technology was much better than what everyone else was offering. The team was inspired. A couple of them created a pirate flag, with a skull, crossbones, and the colorful Apple logo for an eye patch, and flew it from the Macintosh building” (Blumenthal, 2012, p. 116). His rebellious nature was infectious, inspiring, and deeply authentic. After all, his unwillingness to ‘join the Navy’ ultimately led to his ouster from Apple in 1985, a move that would ultimately lead him to start another unconventional company: animation studio Pixar. 

Always moving to the beat of his own drummer, Jobs’s personality might best be understood as a pursuit of impact first and foremost. Authenticity and creativity trumped stability, and self-actualization came at the cost of Jobs’s relationships with himself and those around him. While at a career low in 1994, he lamented his celebrity status in Silicon Valley, telling Rolling Stone, “I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me. Because otherwise, you go crazy. You read some negative article some idiot writes about you — you just can’t take it too personally. But then that teaches you not to take the really great ones too personally either. People like symbols, and they write about symbols” (Goodell, 2011). 

Indeed, Jobs has become a very complex symbol of the drive of Silicon Valley innovators, serving as an inspiration for a new generation of creatives and builders.

Final Thoughts

Steve Jobs's iconic and multifaceted persona defies simple or singular theoretical explanation. From the perspective of the psychodynamic approach, his drive, defiance, and defensiveness can be largely attributed to his being adopted at an early age. This is evident from his desire to control everything around him, as well as his notably conflicted relationships with others. From the humanistic perspective, Jobs’s legendary drive to achieve his full potential and his focus on turning his idiosyncratic vision into innovative and aesthetically groundbreaking products resulted in a reciprocal determinism with Silicon Valley and the tech scene as a whole. His pursuit of his self-actualization through the authentic expression of his creative aspirations in life (with a well-known rebellious streak) was his effort to “make a dent in the universe,” even though his unfortunately abrasive and hurtful characteristics seemingly often impeded his personal growth.

In terms of the psychology of personality, Jobs’s indelible character can not be ascribed to one perspective. Instead, his visionary genius, perfectionism, and rough interactions with the people around him are better explained by a multi-perspective approach that links the psychodynamic reasoning around his early childhood with his unconscious processes and the humanistic focus on his own goals and drive to express his authentic self. The social-cognitive principles in terms of Jobs’s extremely high level of self-efficacy and the reciprocation of his beliefs and behavior with his extraordinary life and accomplishments also play a key role in this context. It can be concluded that Jobs, like many of the most influential leaders of our species, have been too enigmatic and captivating to be restricted to a particular psychological explanation.

Driven by childhood pain and fueled by incomparable self-efficacy, Steve Jobs’s pursuit of self-actualization pushed him to change the nature of technology, the world around him, and his personality. And in the end, Jobs succeeded in his goals. In 1997, with Steve Jobs back at the helm of Apple after a decade of exile, the company released a new commercial featuring a famous “Think Different” monologue. While the original televised commercial was voiced by Richard Dryfuss, Jobs’s personal recordings of the speech were played at his funeral (Isaacson, 2011, p. 577). Jobs’s last words to humanity truly sum up the reality of his impact on innovation, as well as his complex personality:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. 

They push the human race forward. 

While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

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