"At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him."

"He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. 'He thinks there are a few people who are special — people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India — and he’s one of them,' said [Andy] Hertzfeld. 'He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.' Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.' If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him."

A paragraph from Walter Isaacson's fabulous biography "Steve Jobs." I'm reading it and loving it. I'll share some more stuff as I go along.

I'd give you a page cite, but I'm reading it in the Kindle (the app, on iPad) so I can only give you "Kindle location 2242-2251." Is that how we will do cites in the future?