Steve-jobs-success-story

Born to a single mother, given away for adoption and my parents didn’t even go to college. Oh woe is me, my life is doomed. At least that is how I could have thought but I controlled my own destiny and I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me otherwise. My mother had cowed my biological mom into making sure that I would attend college and they saved up every last penny and enrolled me in Reed College to study science, literature and poetry…but I dropped out

My name is Steve Jobs and dropping out was probably the most important decision I made. It allowed me to follow my curiosity and intuition and by doing so I ended up in a calligraphy class learning about typefaces and the spacing between letters. I didn’t know it at the time, but this information was extremely helpful for me later on.

I got a job at Hewlett Packard and I met this geek there, Steve Wozniak, and the 2 of us just clicked. He liked electronics and computers and so did I. The year was 1976 and I remember my mom yelling from the backdoor of the garage “don’t you boys have anything better to do than to be tinkering around with electronics in the garage? Go out and play some sports for goodness sake”. Mom wouldn’t understand; this was my passion and I and Woz stuck around in the garage building our first computer.

We had joined computer club called the Homebrew computer club where we got to show of our new computer. Lucky for us, someone else was watching and noticed we were 2 budding entrepreneurs ready to make a difference. He gave us an offer, 50 computers at 500 bucks each. We accepted without hesitation and thus, Apple was born!

But things were just getting started. In 1979 I made a trip down to Xerox and what I saw changed the course of computing forever, the GUI (Graphical User Interface). And the best part was, these guys at Xerox just gave it to me to fool around with, can you imagine? From there we created the beautiful looking mac, which launched in 1984 with a mouse and keyboard and GUI. It was phenomenal.

You wont believe what happened next – I get canned from my own company and relegated to chairman of product innovation. Why? Because I didn’t believe the CEO I hired, John Scully, was doing what was best for the company and I let everyone hear it. And everyone turned against me. I couldn’t take it. I quit in 4 months, but I didn’t quit working, I started another company called NExT and an Animation company called Pixar (have you seen Toy Stories – yeah that was me!).

I would watch Apple from the peripheral during this period and I saw a sinking ship heading for its doom. It wasn’t until 1997 where they called me back to raise the company from the dead. But I did. I remember the days where I had to sleep in my friend’s kitchen apartment, or return coke bottles for money and walk 7km to the local Hare Krishna temple to get a good meal. Boy am I glad those days are over