A Genius is Born
On February 24, 1955, a boy is born in San Francisco, California. His parents, both young Wisconsin University graduates, gave him up for adoption. The couple desperately wanted to finish their education and believed that a child would disrupt their students and subsequent careers. Their decision to give up the baby was, in their eyes, the best option for both themselves and the boy. Their only condition was that the adoption family would send their child to college. So, on that February day, a future innovative leader was left without a family. His parents did not name him, did not give him their names, and did not leave him any information to find them by. (11)(18)
The Jobses
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The family that adopted the boy was the Jobs family, a lower-middle class couple. Clara Jobs had only finished high school and was working as an accountant while Paul Jobs was a coast guard veteran of World War II who worked as a machinist. They simply wanted to love and nurture their new baby; paying for his college education was a matter they would deal with in the future. However, Clara and Paul made their promise and the boy was officially their son. They named him Steven Paul Jobs. (2)(11)
Three years after Steve was adopted, the Jobses adopted a baby girl, Patty. With a bigger family to raise, Paul moved his family to a rental house in Mountain View, California in 1960. (11)
Three years after Steve was adopted, the Jobses adopted a baby girl, Patty. With a bigger family to raise, Paul moved his family to a rental house in Mountain View, California in 1960. (11)
Young Steve
As a toddler, Steve would often wake at four in the morning. His parents bought him a rocking horse so he could play by himself without disrupting them. Clara was a stay-at-home mother as Steve was growing up. She spent a lot of time with Steve, teaching him how to read before school started. Paul Jobs taught his son how to use a hammer and saw to build things. At the age of five, Paul sectioned of part of his workbench just for Steve to use and welcomed the boy to share his tools and space.
Paul liked to fix up old cars and sell them. He showed his son how to take apart and put back together electronic pieces and would get Steve things for him to reassemble. He always told Steve that 'every part should be well made and put together with precision and care, whether the part showed or not'. This would become Steve's mantra for building electronics in his Apple days.(11)
School was hard for Steve in the beginning. The controlled environment and authority did not appeal to him at all. He recalls, "They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me."
As a child, Steve did not like being told what to do. When he did not get his way, he would cry and storm off to be alone. Steve took this habit with him to adulthood; When he was disagreed with in Apple, his tactics were very similar to those of his childhood. (11)
Steve was also a very mischievous student. In the third grade, he spent his time setting off explosives in the teacher’s desk, letting loose snakes in the classrooms, and switching around everyone’s bike locks with his partner in crime, Rick Ferrentino. The following year, the principal was determined to separate the two. Steve was placed in Mrs. Imogene Hill’s advanced fourth grade classes, free from the distraction of his best friend.
In this first weeks of school, Mrs. Hill gave Steve a challenge: If he could finish a math workbook at home on his own time and get over eighty percent of the answers right, he would receive a giant lollipop and five dollars. Steve emerged from this challenge five dollars richer, sucking on a lollipop. His success proved to Mrs. Hill that Steve was not only intelligent, but also had a love of learning and challenges.
He recalls Mrs. Hill to be “one of the other saints of my life…I think I probably learned more academically that one year than I’ve ever learned in my life. I’m a hundred percent sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I absolutely would have ended up in jail.”
At the end of that year, Steve tested so well that the school system wanted to advance him directly to high the next year. His parents thought that moving eleven-year-old Steve to a high school would do horrors to his mental well-being, so they declined. They did, however, agree to have him skip one grade, the fifth. (11)
One day, a young engineer, Larry Lang, moved onto Steve’s street. Twelve-year-old Steve automatically gravitated to this man. Lang worked at Hewlett Packard and knew a lot about electronics. Steve spent a lot of time at Larry’s garage, which served as an electronics workshop. Lang would show him how to use Heathkits. Heatkits were kits that came with all the parts to a certain product with an in-depth manual on how to build the product. This way, Steve could learn about how a finished product worked and use this knowledge to figure out how other things in the world worked as well. This knowledge came with a sense of confidence because he now understood the things around him; a television was no longer a mystery, a radio was no longer foreign. Jobs said, in an interview, “Things became much more clear. It gave one a tremendous degree of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.”
In 1967, Lang arranged for Steve to join the Hewlett-Packard’s Explorer Club. One meeting that left a particularly deep impression on Steve was when the engineers brought out the desktop computers. “I wanted one badly… I just thought they were neat. I just wanted to mess around with one,” he recalls. (11)
In 8th grade, Jobs wanted to build a frequency counter but realized some parts were missing. Steve did what was completely reasonable to him but nervy and bold to the general people: He called Bill Hewlett and asked for the parts he needed. They chatted for twenty minutes and Hewlett ended up giving Steve a summer internship at HP doing assembly lines for frequency counters. (11)(18)
Meanwhile, at school, Steve was bullied. The school he attended was an unsafe one; Police were often called to break up fights. It got so bad that Steve threatened to drop out of school if they did not move. The Jobs knew their son meant what he said, they also knew the school had a bad environment. They moved to Los Altos in 1967. This area would later be known as the Silicon Valley.
Bill Fernandez was one of Steve’s new friends at the Cupertino Junior High. The boys would spent many afternoons in Bill’s electronic workshop garage. It was Bill who introduced Steve to a family across the street from the Fernandez family- the Wozniaks. Jerry Wozniak taught the children of the neighborhood about technology. His eldest son, Steve Wozniak, was an eighteen-year-old electronics genius who went by the nickname “Woz”.
Steve and Steve Woz clicked instantly. They had a lot in common and their personalities were compatible with each other’s. Steve admired Woz, saying, “He was the first person I met who knew more about computers than I did.” Steve spent his high school years with Bill and Woz at the electronics supply store, in their garages, and at Stanford University, taking classes. (11)
Paul liked to fix up old cars and sell them. He showed his son how to take apart and put back together electronic pieces and would get Steve things for him to reassemble. He always told Steve that 'every part should be well made and put together with precision and care, whether the part showed or not'. This would become Steve's mantra for building electronics in his Apple days.(11)
School was hard for Steve in the beginning. The controlled environment and authority did not appeal to him at all. He recalls, "They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me."
As a child, Steve did not like being told what to do. When he did not get his way, he would cry and storm off to be alone. Steve took this habit with him to adulthood; When he was disagreed with in Apple, his tactics were very similar to those of his childhood. (11)
Steve was also a very mischievous student. In the third grade, he spent his time setting off explosives in the teacher’s desk, letting loose snakes in the classrooms, and switching around everyone’s bike locks with his partner in crime, Rick Ferrentino. The following year, the principal was determined to separate the two. Steve was placed in Mrs. Imogene Hill’s advanced fourth grade classes, free from the distraction of his best friend.
In this first weeks of school, Mrs. Hill gave Steve a challenge: If he could finish a math workbook at home on his own time and get over eighty percent of the answers right, he would receive a giant lollipop and five dollars. Steve emerged from this challenge five dollars richer, sucking on a lollipop. His success proved to Mrs. Hill that Steve was not only intelligent, but also had a love of learning and challenges.
He recalls Mrs. Hill to be “one of the other saints of my life…I think I probably learned more academically that one year than I’ve ever learned in my life. I’m a hundred percent sure that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I absolutely would have ended up in jail.”
At the end of that year, Steve tested so well that the school system wanted to advance him directly to high the next year. His parents thought that moving eleven-year-old Steve to a high school would do horrors to his mental well-being, so they declined. They did, however, agree to have him skip one grade, the fifth. (11)
One day, a young engineer, Larry Lang, moved onto Steve’s street. Twelve-year-old Steve automatically gravitated to this man. Lang worked at Hewlett Packard and knew a lot about electronics. Steve spent a lot of time at Larry’s garage, which served as an electronics workshop. Lang would show him how to use Heathkits. Heatkits were kits that came with all the parts to a certain product with an in-depth manual on how to build the product. This way, Steve could learn about how a finished product worked and use this knowledge to figure out how other things in the world worked as well. This knowledge came with a sense of confidence because he now understood the things around him; a television was no longer a mystery, a radio was no longer foreign. Jobs said, in an interview, “Things became much more clear. It gave one a tremendous degree of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.”
In 1967, Lang arranged for Steve to join the Hewlett-Packard’s Explorer Club. One meeting that left a particularly deep impression on Steve was when the engineers brought out the desktop computers. “I wanted one badly… I just thought they were neat. I just wanted to mess around with one,” he recalls. (11)
In 8th grade, Jobs wanted to build a frequency counter but realized some parts were missing. Steve did what was completely reasonable to him but nervy and bold to the general people: He called Bill Hewlett and asked for the parts he needed. They chatted for twenty minutes and Hewlett ended up giving Steve a summer internship at HP doing assembly lines for frequency counters. (11)(18)
Meanwhile, at school, Steve was bullied. The school he attended was an unsafe one; Police were often called to break up fights. It got so bad that Steve threatened to drop out of school if they did not move. The Jobs knew their son meant what he said, they also knew the school had a bad environment. They moved to Los Altos in 1967. This area would later be known as the Silicon Valley.
Bill Fernandez was one of Steve’s new friends at the Cupertino Junior High. The boys would spent many afternoons in Bill’s electronic workshop garage. It was Bill who introduced Steve to a family across the street from the Fernandez family- the Wozniaks. Jerry Wozniak taught the children of the neighborhood about technology. His eldest son, Steve Wozniak, was an eighteen-year-old electronics genius who went by the nickname “Woz”.
Steve and Steve Woz clicked instantly. They had a lot in common and their personalities were compatible with each other’s. Steve admired Woz, saying, “He was the first person I met who knew more about computers than I did.” Steve spent his high school years with Bill and Woz at the electronics supply store, in their garages, and at Stanford University, taking classes. (11)
Start of Adulthood
In 1972, Steve went off to college. He decided that Reed, and expensive college in Portland, Oregon, was the only college he wanted to go to, despite his parents’ lack of financial stability. Nevertheless, Paul and Clara kept true to the promise they made seventeen years ago and sent their son to Reed. He dropped out after just six months. “After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”
After discontinuing his college education, Jobs decided to stay in Portland and ‘continue his education’. To do so, he camped out at friends’ dorms or vacated dorms from previous dropouts. Jobs was a strange young man at this time. He only stuck to very specific diets of only a certain type of food- like eating only fruits. Sometimes, he would even fast for days so he could ‘find a better lifestyle’. On Sunday nights, he would go to the Hare Krishna temple and eat a free, strictly vegetarian meal. Steve became a vegetarian and stayed one for the rest of his life.
After eighteen months of this lifestyle, he decided to move back in with his parents in Los Altos. While searching for jobs in the city, he came upon an ad for a job at Atari. Steve was hired immediately, despite his body odor and quirks. Alcorn, the man who hired Steve said “He was determined to have the job, and there was some spark, some inner energy, an attitude that he was going to get it done.” (11)
Steve worked hard at Atari to save up for a trip to India so he could meet his guru idol, Neem Karoli Baba. One day, he had an idea that would get him to India. He convinced Atari to pay for his trip by agreeing to work in Germany for a period of time to help some German technicians.
In the 1970s, Jobs arrived in New Delhi and stayed a month with Dan Kottke, a friend from Reed. After they learned that their guru had died earlier that year, they spent their time meditating, reading, experimenting with psychedelic drugs, and walking through the villages in the blazing summer temperatures. After the trip, Steve admitted that their month was not enlightening as he had hoped. “It was one of the first times I started thinking that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together.” (11)
In 1975, Steve was reconnected with Woz, who had gotten a job working at HP trying to design a new computer. The two Steves shared the dream of building a computer that was affordable and for personal use. In 1976, Steve convinced Woz to start a business with him by saying, “If we lose our money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company!”
When Woz asked what they should call their company, Steve responded,
“Apple”.
(11)
After discontinuing his college education, Jobs decided to stay in Portland and ‘continue his education’. To do so, he camped out at friends’ dorms or vacated dorms from previous dropouts. Jobs was a strange young man at this time. He only stuck to very specific diets of only a certain type of food- like eating only fruits. Sometimes, he would even fast for days so he could ‘find a better lifestyle’. On Sunday nights, he would go to the Hare Krishna temple and eat a free, strictly vegetarian meal. Steve became a vegetarian and stayed one for the rest of his life.
After eighteen months of this lifestyle, he decided to move back in with his parents in Los Altos. While searching for jobs in the city, he came upon an ad for a job at Atari. Steve was hired immediately, despite his body odor and quirks. Alcorn, the man who hired Steve said “He was determined to have the job, and there was some spark, some inner energy, an attitude that he was going to get it done.” (11)
Steve worked hard at Atari to save up for a trip to India so he could meet his guru idol, Neem Karoli Baba. One day, he had an idea that would get him to India. He convinced Atari to pay for his trip by agreeing to work in Germany for a period of time to help some German technicians.
In the 1970s, Jobs arrived in New Delhi and stayed a month with Dan Kottke, a friend from Reed. After they learned that their guru had died earlier that year, they spent their time meditating, reading, experimenting with psychedelic drugs, and walking through the villages in the blazing summer temperatures. After the trip, Steve admitted that their month was not enlightening as he had hoped. “It was one of the first times I started thinking that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together.” (11)
In 1975, Steve was reconnected with Woz, who had gotten a job working at HP trying to design a new computer. The two Steves shared the dream of building a computer that was affordable and for personal use. In 1976, Steve convinced Woz to start a business with him by saying, “If we lose our money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company!”
When Woz asked what they should call their company, Steve responded,
“Apple”.
(11)