I Am John Galt (3 page)

Atlas Shrugged
is set in an America that Rand extrapolated from the creeping threat of collectivism all around her. Its plot tracks the growth of a counterrevolutionary movement designed to restore individualism and freedom. The unique twist is that the counterrevolutionaries—a growing cabal of industrialists, artists, and professionals disgusted by the devolving world around them—do nothing at all to turn the tide of events. They literally
do nothing
, which is to say that they go on strike and withdraw their minds from the corrupt world, refusing to contribute to it in any way. Rand's key insight here is that evil is powerless in the same way that any parasite is—collectivists require productive individuals whose work they can expropriate, just as a flea requires a dog.

John Galt is the ideal man of
Atlas Shrugged
, the “perfect” one around whom a cast of imperfect heroes and villains orbit. The heroes are industrialists who love their work so much they can't bring themselves to go on strike, and so continue to inadvertently serve the collectivist villains. Those villains are corrupt businessmen and bureaucrats who seek collectivism for a variety of reasons, all having to do with their personal impotence.

Over the course of the novel, Galt recruits more and more able men to his strike, and as their talents are withdrawn from the world, the economy falls into severe decline. The collectivists get increasingly desperate, and expropriate the remaining productive individuals all the more—until finally they, too, join Galt in his strike. Ultimately the economy utterly collapses, and Galt leads his strikers back to the world to rebuild it from the ruins.

Surely part of the twenty-first-century readership revival in Rand's work is a Newtonian reaction to the chain of events that began with the terrorist attacks and global economic collapse of the past decade. That collapse was triggered by decades of an unholy alliance between corrupt businesspeople and corrupt bureaucrats. In the wake of these events there has been a resurgence of government intervention in our personal lives and in the economy, reaching in the United States all the way to government takeovers of major private banks, financial firms, and manufacturing companies—many of which had corruptly intertwined themselves with government to begin with—and most recently the health care industry. Collectivism is most assuredly not a dated relic of the Cold War era. It's here and now. It's not just the world of
Atlas Shrugged
. It's the world we live in.

Living the Life of an Ayn Rand Hero

Ayn Rand's heroes are larger-than-life projections of her ideals. They lead lives of virtue based on consistent personal convictions with a coherent philosophical system to guide them. Today's real-life heroes universally did the hard work, tedious at times, to achieve their success based on their own effort and mental acuity. Steve Jobs created the revolutionary Apple II through what one observer called “moxie and energy,” and then engrossed himself in mind-numbing details for every nuance of the Macintosh user interface to deliver a tangible product that was often called “insanely great.” T. J. Rodgers studied the molecular structure of silicon to make subatomic improvements and create ultrafast memory chips. Bill Gates spent tens of thousands of hours immersed in the inner workings of computers, writing millions of lines of code.

These heroes are not typically motivated by money per se, but they see money as a tool with which to create and build. Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computer at a symbolic salary of $1. Bill Gates flies commercial without an entourage. He agonized over a $12,000 boat purchase even though he had the means to buy a dozen luxury yachts.

The Randian innovator's life purpose is not some do-gooder vision of altruism or charity, but a core drive to work hard, produce value, and follow an inner vision with supreme self-reliance. Steve Wozniak once said about his Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, “He's not concerned with what contribution he's making. He wants to astound himself, for himself.”
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Heroes work from fact. Milton Friedman came to his conclusions about free-market economics through empirical analysis, discovering for himself that the New Deal promises of his early career were patently false in the face of hard evidence. Bill Gates was known as a nimble businessman able to quickly change direction if the facts didn't support his initial ideas. For them, truth is objective and concrete. “Silicon doesn't lie,” says T. J. Rodgers.

Heroes stand for principles, not expediency. BB&T CEO John Allison denied his bank millions in fat fees because he believed that exotic mortgages were bad for his customers. T. J. Rodgers resigned from the board of a company he helped found rather than be pressured into lobbying the government for subsidies.

By contrast, modern-day villains are just like Rand's literary ones—expedient, scheming, and leaching value from others rather than doing the hard work of creating. Barney Frank is a lifelong politician who never spent a day working in a bank, brokerage, or financial institution—yet he weaseled his way to the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee, where he presided over governmental interventions in housing that catalyzed a historic mortgage bubble. Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide Financial overlooked blatant fraud in his company to make a quick buck off of the government subsidies created by Frank. Together, in the name of the noble-sounding altruistic goal of universal home ownership, the two of them very nearly destroyed the world economy. And they also wrecked the financial and emotional lives of countless individuals they purported to be helping. So much for altruism.

Villains ignore the facts of reality in favor of their own irrational opinions. Their idea of truth is whatever the collective believes, regardless of empirical evidence. Mozilo told investors that his company was sound, as he secretly sold his own shares ahead of the collapse he saw coming. “Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending . . . they didn't do any subprime,”
18
said collectivist apologist Paul Krugman, while Fannie Mae itself published facts admitting to buying up subprime debt. Jesse Jackson's camp called T. J. Rodgers's company (with a 35 percent minority employee base) a “white supremacist hate group,”
19
as punishment for Rodgers publicly challenging Jackson's own hate-based tirades about race.

Why It Matters Today

We could conclude by arguing that living by Rand's philosophy is important today because the threat of collectivism is as salient as ever. Indeed it is as salient as ever, with the United States having just effectively nationalized health care, 14 percent of the economy—and the most innovative and vibrant part of it—by claiming that it is “broken.” And indeed the threat is as salient as ever, with China, a totalitarian dictatorship over 1.2 billion souls, now leading the world in industrial development.

But we won't say that. The reason to live Rand's philosophy isn't that it's good for the world. That's altruism talking. The reason is that it's in your own interest to live Rand's philosophy. Do you want to have integrity? Do you want to devote yourself to creative, constructive work? Do you want to be happy and wealthy as a result?

Do you want these things for your own sake? Then make it so. We'll help you by showing you how others have done it, by profiling both the heroes who make our world great and the villains out to destroy it.

If it just happens to save the world in the process, then so much the better.

Chapter 1

The Individualist

Steve Jobs as Howard Roark, the man who reinvented four whole industries just because it was so cool

“I don't intend to build in order to serve or help anyone. I don't intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.”

“How do you propose to force your ideas on them?”

“I don't propose to force or be forced. Those who want me will come to me.”

—The Fountainhead

When Steve Jobs took the stage in October 2001, he was a man resurrected, returned home from a classic hero's journey, still true to his singular vision, but battle-hardened from 12 years wandering the business wilderness as a castoff from the tribe he founded. He was grayer and leaner, yet still sharp-edged like tempered steel emerging from the fire, himself the sword the journeying hero forges in the great myths.

Or more exactly, here was Howard Roark—Ayn Rand's brilliant and rebellious architect hero from
The Fountainhead
—returning to the city to erect a stunning skyscraper embodying his own epoch-making vision, after being forced to labor in a granite quarry merely to survive.

Here was the intransigent individualist who invented a worldwide culture of personal computing, and was unceremoniously ousted from the seat of his creation by collective forces bent on harnessing and diffusing his disruptive vision through committees and opaque corporate processes. Along the way, he had a brush with financial death and went on to revolutionize a second industry—only to be recalled to rescue his original creation from the brink of collapse. Jobs was back to lead the rebirth of Apple Computer, clear the debris left by the collective that had ousted him, and rebuild his masterwork on the solid foundations of his individual vision, as he first had 17 years before.

He was close-cropped, scruffy, and dressed in his now-signature black mock turtleneck and jeans; gone were the suit coat, button-down shirt, bow tie, and boyish mop of hair from his 1984 inaugural Macintosh presentation. Gone, too, were the thematic
Chariots of Fire
music and talking computer gimmicks amid a cheering auditorium packed with thousands of devotees. Instead, Jobs cast a deep resonating spell of low-key personal charisma—the kind that captures and holds an audience rapt with a mere whisper.

The new uniform was deliberate. On one level, Jobs was subordinating his corporeal body to his visionary creations by shedding props and presentational artifice to allow a clearer focus on the product of his mind. The question was not “What would Steve wear?” but “What revolutionary new idea will he present today?” It was also symbolic of his simplified approach to Apple upon his return as interim CEO in 1997, when he quickly pared the growing number of foundering product groups from 15 down to a focused three
1
while slashing inefficient overhead, laying off employees, and repopulating his board of directors with handpicked replacements, including Larry Ellison of Oracle and former Apple sales head Bill Campbell, then CEO of Intuit.
2

In his signature presentation style, Jobs began his homecoming pitch to a small assembly of attendees at an Apple Music event. With a relaxed and unhurried ease he spoke of the market, competition, underlying technology, and the recipe for success in leveraging the Apple brand. In a seamless and nearly undetectable transition to aesthetics, he then began describing the design and usability of an entirely new-breed model of music accessibility. As he built to a crescendo, the audience was salivating in suspense. “Durable. Beautiful. And this is what the front looks like. Boom!” he exclaimed. “That's iPod. And I happen to have one in my pocket.”

Yet the moment had even deeper meaning than the introduction of a cool new product. It was evidence of how Jobs's entire existence symbolized right and left brains harmonized—analytics and creativity coexisting in a symbiotic blend of productive energy focused on the output of human creation instead of the cumbersome tools used to hammer those ideas into reality. He had spent a lifetime transcending the chasm between silicon-based technology and carbon-based humans. The world called that the “user interface.” To Jobs, it was a barrier, a gap, and his vision was to make that gap seem nonexistent. And now he was doing it again, with a revolutionary product of his unique mind that would transform the popular culture of the world.

He once called the personal computer (PC) “the equivalent of a bicycle to our minds” as a metaphor for human ingenuity's ability to leverage our physical capabilities beyond anything in the natural world.
3
A person on foot is quickly outpaced by most of the animal kingdom, he would explain. When that same person conceives and designs a set of wheels connected by gears and pedals, he or she becomes the most efficiently self-mobile creature on earth. But just as a bicycle without a rider is a mere hunk of metal, a computer can amplify the intellect only when a human mind is powering it. This interface between mind and machine is where Steve Jobs lives.

According to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, “He was never driven by a vision of a better world; he was driven by a vision of himself as a person whose decisions guide the world. He wanted to build a device that moved the world forward, that would take people further. He wanted to build a reality that wasn't there. He wanted to be one of the important ones. He either likes what he's looking at or he doesn't. He's not concerned with what contribution he's making. He wants to astound himself, for himself.”
4

Ayn Rand‘s first great novel,
The Fountainhead
, was built around such a man, a supreme individualist—or “egoist” in Rand's terms—Howard Roark. In the words of Roark, “I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”

He's been referred to as a charismatic boy wonder, the Alpha Adolescent, a cultural phenomenon, a consumer technology impresario, an adroit chief executive, a cultural revolutionary, a man with three faces, a zealot, the enfant terrible, an arbiter of popular culture, a temperamental micromanager. Yet he is simply an individual—an individual who dares to shape the world in accord with what Roark would call his “unborrowed vision” and his “independent judgment.”

Like Rand herself, Jobs dares to judge the world in binary terms, in what Rand would call the Aristotelian mode of determining either-or. Products, in his view, are either “insanely great” or “shit.” One is either dying from cancer or “cured.” Subordinates are either geniuses or “bozos,” either indispensable or irrelevant.
5
And like Rand's iconic individualist Roark, Jobs works for his own reward and satisfaction in his own unbending terms. He returned to lead Apple, accepting a salary of only $1, saying, “The only purpose for me in building a company is so that it can make products.”
6
And like Roark, Jobs doesn't rely on the opinions of others to define his own views. He has the self-confidence to know that all great ideas throughout history have sprung from the intellect of a single individual. “The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain,” said Howard Roark.

Jobs doesn't see himself creating something new as much as he is discovering what others can't see. Like the myth of Prometheus and his discovery of fire, Steve is constantly surprising the world by meeting the needs and desires that people never knew they had. Comparing Jobs with Polaroid inventor Dr. Edwin Land, former Apple CEO John Sculley said, “Both of them had this ability not to invent products but to discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed—it's just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed, and the Macintosh always existed—it's a matter of discovery.”
7

Yet for Jobs such discoveries are, of necessity, the discovery of himself. “If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn't have told me,” Jobs once explained. “There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it, and then show it to people, and say now what do you think?”
8
Apple marketing chief Mike Murray observed, “Steve did his market research by looking into the mirror every morning.”
9

Anyone who has ever been curious enough to disassemble an iPod quickly realizes it looks the way it does on the outside because of what's inside. The economy of space, the use of materials both durable and stylish, the most leading-edge components of the day, the physical layout, and the user interface are all unique to the end function—making software manifest in the physical world while simultaneously making it invisible to the user. In short, Apple products look a certain way because they have to.

According to Sculley, “Steve's brilliance is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put it into the context of his design methodology—everything is design. He's a minimalist and constantly reducing things to their simplest level. It's not simplistic. It's simplified. Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity.”
10

Or in describing Howard Roark's architectural design mentor Henry Cameron, “He said only that the form of a building must follow its function; that the structure of a building is the key to its beauty; that new methods of construction demand new forms; that he wished to build as he wished and for that reason only.”

Jobs has spent a lifetime living by Roark's own singular rulebook not as the designer of buildings, but as the architect of a new approach to technology. Or in Roark's words, “The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. . . . Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul.”

Yes, It All Began in a Garage

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. His mother was an unmarried graduate student who gave him up for adoption to Paul and Clara Jobs, the couple Steve would always consider his true parents even after reconnecting with his genetic lineage later in life. The adoption almost fell through. Steve's biological mother initially refused to sign the adoption papers, insisting that her son be adopted by college graduates. Clara had never graduated from college. Paul wasn't even a high school graduate. Steve's mother eventually relented when the Jobses promised her they'd send Steve to college.
11

Paul, the no-nonsense son of a Midwestern farmer, had dropped out of high school and enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, where he mastered the trade of engine mechanics. With his crew cut and tattoos, Paul exuded a hearty and productive blue-collar pride. Possessing an innate mechanical aptitude, Paul loved to tinker with cars. He would buy old junkers and then spend weeks fixing them up to resell at a profit. He was known as a tough negotiator.
12

It was an ironically concrete beginning for an abstract intellect like Steve's, but that solid family foundation rooted him in an ethic of hard work and personal responsibility. His father's pursuit of profit through hard-nosed entrepreneurship and productive value-added clearly rubbed off on young Steve, who would grow to become an astute and tough-minded deal maker himself. Despite little formal education of his own, Paul also encouraged his son's curiosity and interest in the new field of electronics.