Walter Isaacon’s biography of Steve Jobs is due out in just 4 days, and will be the first time any of us has seen in to the personal thoughts of Apple’s founder. It’s fair to say that none of us have great insight in to the man’s personal thoughts or feelings on anything.  Isaacson, his biographer, will be appearing on 60 minutes on Sunday evening at 7pm Eastern on CBS. In the video above we get a brief glimpse of that interview (sorry iOS readers, it’s in Flash). In this interview he states that Jobs expressed regret at not taking the medical advice sooner and having the potentially life-saving surgery.

For those without Flash, here’s the essence of what was said:

“I’ve asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, ‘I didn’t want my body to be opened…I didn’t want to be violated in that way,’” Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by [60 Minutes correspondent Steve] Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, “I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking…we talked about this a lot,” he tells Kroft. “He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it….I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”

To me it seems such a shame that a man of his obvious brilliance went against the advice of so many people for so long before having the surgery. It could have saved him. But, we’ll never know for sure.

I – for one – am looking forward to downloading the iBook on Monday to finally look behind the onstage presence of Jobs and see what was really going on in his life and mind.

Via: CBS News