I recently finished reading Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Issacson. I’ve read a few anecdotes about Jobs before, so although I wasn’t surprised that he was an innovative asshole, I was a bit surprised by the extent of his assholism. It got me wondering about the role this played in his success, but also about what factors make someone like this.

I was making some pasta at the end of a long workday recently, and hunger had caught up with me. Now I don’t know about you, but when I’m hungry I get cranky and rather unpleasant to be around.

There’s something primitive that happens when you start to get hungry, theres a bit of the territorial lizard brain that kicks in as if you need to stake your claim to what food there is, even if there’s plenty. In my case I know this territorial instinct tends to manifest itself in a lack of social grace. When I’m hungry I tend to have very little patience for other peoples input, ideas, questions or interruptions. It also tends to affect my empathy and the filters for what I say or the way that I express myself.

I can work on my own fine when I’m hungry, in fact sometimes there even seems to be a slight edge that can help to make me more efficient, but in that state I’m not good at dealing with people.

I was in this state as I was making dinner when I started thinking about Jobs and his eating habits.

Jobs had inconsistent, but very restrictive eating habits. He would go for weeks at a time eating only a single food (like apples or carrots). He seems to have had a life long fascination with starvation diets. With limited calorie intake, I have to wonder if this had an effect on his notoriously rude and cruel interpersonal interactions.

I’m not suggesting that Steve Jobs would have been a fat and jolly man who never abandoned a child if he had a more normal diet. The man was an asshole and a perfectionist who helped drive teams to either self destruct or create some truly amazing things. I just wonder if he would have been slightly less of an asshole if he had eaten proper meals.