The Legendary Man: Truth and Fiction About Steve Jobs

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

February 24 would have turned 62 years old man who is called the "father of the digital revolution", the founder of the "Apple" corporation Steve Jobs … He passed away at 56, but even during his lifetime there were so many myths about him that today it is difficult to figure out which of them correspond to reality. He became a legend and an example to follow, but they say that his personal qualities, unlike business ones, could not be admired.

Rumors that Steve Jobs was not a native, but an adopted child in the family, in fact, are well founded. His biological parents were a Syrian emigrant and an American graduate student, who abandoned him a week after birth and sent him up for adoption. Steven Paul Jobs always called his adoptive parents family.

When, many years later, his father, having learned about who his son had become, wanted to meet him, he refused. But they had already met before, not knowing about their relationship. Steve often visited a restaurant owned by his biological father. He later commented on this fact very dryly: “I went to that restaurant several times. I remember meeting with the owner. He was a Syrian. Balding. We shook hands with each other. And at 23, Jobs, like his father, abandoned his child: when his daughter Lisa was born, he denied his paternity for a long time.

The information that Steve Jobs did not have a higher education is true. At the age of 17, he entered the expensive Reed College in Portland, but studied there for only one semester. He explained this by the fact that all the savings of his parents went to study, and he did not see the point in this. Steve Jobs believed that he did not need an education, and he considered the decision to leave college one of the most correct in his life. But the claim that he was a dropout is a myth. While still in high school, he attended lectures by the Hewlett Packard engineers. After dropping out, he remained a free college student for another year and a half, while at the same time he became interested in studying Zen Buddhism and various spiritual practices.

In his youth, Steve Jobs used soft drugs, which he saw nothing reprehensible, and this is not a myth. He first tried marijuana at the age of 15, in 1973-1977. he smoked it regularly, once a week. In addition, he took LSD, believing that it helped him to "relax and create." He described his feelings in this state as "a huge experience, one of the most important things that happened in life." But he did not take other drugs, and experiments with "expanding consciousness", he said, stopped in 1977.

One of the most common myths about Steve Jobs is his love of informal dressing style and monstrous slovenliness. This is partly true. They say that in his youth he loved to walk barefoot, and when colleagues resented his dirty feet, he could easily wash them in the office toilet. This was during his work at the Atari company, which became his first job. Steve Jobs turned all his colleagues against himself, which is why his boss transferred him to work on the night shift, where he worked alone. But the information that in the future Steve wore only jeans and black turtlenecks is not entirely correct. He really thought it was the most comfortable outfit, but where the uniform was inappropriate, Jobs did not use it: at the exhibition in Tokyo, he appeared in a suit, and at the Oscars in a tuxedo. And he often came to work in a T-shirt and a jacket.

The myth that Jobs' salary at Apple was one dollar a year is actually a fact. The fact is that executives did not receive salaries, but performance bonuses, incentives and company shares, and in 2000, the year of record sales of computers, Apple gave Jobs a private jet worth $ 88 million. And according to the documents, he received $ 1 a year.

Another common myth about Jobs is his oppressive nature, authoritarian style of management and bullying of corporate employees. To some extent, this is true. He was a perfectionist and had high demands on everyone. He was attentive to details and little things that seemed important to him. Jobs could be harsh, harsh, and ruthless if something was done without his personal consent. Many considered him to be overconfident, cruel, rude and arrogant.

In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The operation could have saved him, but he did not dare to do it for a long time, since he did not recognize the invasion of the human body. He took up alternative treatment, but later regretted it. In 2011, he died of cancer. Some creative people reacted to the news of his death in a very original way: drawings of cartoonists in memory of the ex-chapter of "Apple".