A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan (Transcript)

The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs – An intimate look at the life of Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan, the mother of his first child providing rare insight into Jobs’s formative, lesser-known years…

TRANSCRIPT: 

Chrisann Brennan 

I just wrote this. It wasn’t a part of my talk. And I want to say that I know a lot of people have profound feelings about Steve Jobs. He was a gem and a rare one. And I want to ask you to please only take what’s of value of my talk today and let the rest go. This is such a new world to me.

So many people have so many thoughts. There are so many angles of perception on him. But today, I’m simply talking about my perceptions. And I hope you’ll feel it’s a valuable contribution in total.

I also want to say that I don’t really know the technical world that you guys live in. I don’t know what he created. So this is a new experience for me. And please forgive me for my naivete at certain points. So I’ll begin.

Today, I wanted to talk about creativity and initiative, first mine in writing my book and then Steve’s in creativity as I perceived it. And thirdly, about Creativity, with a capital C, into the future.

Because whether we’re talking about children, new technology, the arts, companies, countries, or the whole world, now more than ever we need to be more conscious in our creating. We’re all so creative that I think we need a metalevel of considerations, councils even, to figure out where we’re going and what we want our outcomes to be.

Here I am at Google, and you have the unofficial byline of “don’t be evil.” And this is what I’m talking about, except more of it, a long list of ethical considerations that people can cross-check because everything is affected by our creating.

Before I start diving into my story, I want you to know that I’m predominantly right brained. I wrote this book cinemagraphically because I’m first and foremost an artist. And the practices of filming help me bridge my experience as a painter into writing. I think in a combination of images, symbols, metaphors, and words. In fact, I don’t even think there’s a big difference between symbols, images, metaphors, and words because they’re as much an energetic fact as this podium is for me. Mainly, I think in terms of energetics.

And I see energy and I have found visualization to be a force for actualization. This is one of my most recent paintings. It was commissioned. And yet when I paint for someone else, I also paint for myself. The painting lay the ground for my book. This was my version of an outline. I didn’t know what it fully meant until I was well into the writing. In fact, I’m still discovering what it means.

I think the future is about left and right brain integration too. It’s the evolutionary next step for people everywhere. And it’s, of course, already started. If I have time, which I don’t think I will, I’ll do a quick decode on the painting at the end of the talk.

And if I don’t, I’ll post the image and a decode on my book’s website, thebiteintheapple.com, by the end of February.

So there were three things that I decided I would never do in this life. I had enough self-knowledge by the time I was 35 years old to know what I wasn’t interested or good at. One was study of history. I’d gotten crippling migraines, at least once a week, in my US history classes when I was young. I wasn’t interested in so much focus on men’s wars, politics, and treaties.