Steve Jobs's family environment, and how his and his family's decisions about education will shape his entire life — and then, he reshaped the world through the creation of Apple and Macintosh. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, brought up by his adoptive parents Paul and Clara Jobs.
Although Jobs later dismissed the claim that the adoption environment had any effect on him, he was directly confronted with custody issues at birth, and his later advantages and astonishing signs were already there from his infancy.
The first adoption was a failure
Jobs's mother, Joanne Schieble, and biological father Abdulfattah "John" Jandali had hoped he would be adopted by a college-educated couple of lawyers, but that didn't happen. The arrangement was made by what Jobs's biographer Walter Isaacson called "a good doctor," but there was a problem. Jobs was a boy. The lawyer who arranged his adoption and his wife decided to have a girl, so withdrew from the discussion.
The doctor found another couple, but Jobs' mother is said to have insisted for weeks after his birth, refusing to sign the necessary documents. She did so ostensibly because the couple Paul and Clara Jobs had no college education, but there was another reason.
In fact, Schieble didn't really want to give up on their son. Her family in Wisconsin had opposed the idea of their marriage, and after her father fell ill and died, Schieble consummated her marriage to Jandali. But it wasn't until after she finally signed the adoption documents. Schieble proposed an adoption condition in which Paul and Clara Jobs needed to open a college fund for the boy.
Later in life, Jobs's friends and colleagues would attribute some of his more difficult encounters to how he was adopted, which made him feel abandoned.
Mac co-developer Andy Hertzfield was one of those who attributed Jobs's occasional cruelty to this. "It goes back to being abandoned at birth," he told Isaacson. "The real underlying problem is the abandoned reality of Steve's life".
Ex-girlfriend Christian Brennan gave the same reason for Jobs's initial denial of being the father of their child. "The one who is abandoned is also an outcast," she said.
However, Jobs himself vehemently denied this throughout his life, calling Paul and Clara Jobs "my parents, 1,000 percent."
Family stress
Jobs still didn't forget to put pressure on his adoptive parents, even though they weren't easy on their own. While they were saving money for his college fund, they also moved to get Jobs into a better school.
So Steve Jobs grew up in a single-story farm house at 2066 Christ Road in Los Altos, California, which led him into the Cupertino School District and just 4 miles from the famous garage where he eventually founded Apple.
It was at Homestead High School there that he first began meeting Steve Wozniak and began making more connections in Silicon Valley.
However, college may be more critical. This time, he chose where he wanted to go, and it was an expensive option. Steve Jobs insisted on going to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and even though tuition was difficult for his family, he insisted on going. However, this may have been an early example of his complete determination of a course, and then he changed his mind and stuck to a different idea, and Jobs subsequently dropped out of Reed College.
Jobs later said that this was partly because of the family's financial pressures and he felt it was inappropriate for them to spend all their money. But it's also because he doesn't like the courses.
And that was certainly an early example of him getting people to do what he wanted to do, and Jobs persuaded Reed College to let him continue his studies there, and he didn't complete the prescribed curriculum, but he was allowed to continue living on campus and was actively encouraged to listen to whatever course he was interested in.
Nature and upbringing
Whether Or not Jobs's adoption led to feelings of abandonment, and whether or not his "reality distortion field" began at Reed College, one thing must have started there. It was precisely because he could take any class he wanted, Jobs took classes on calligraphy and typography.
Jobs said he was already reading "more than science and technology," and by this time he was well-versed in both computers and the liberal arts.
You can't boil a man's life down to how he was born and what he learned. However, you can trace the Macintosh and Apple as a whole back to the combination of everything Steve Jobs came into contact with in his early years and the careful nurturing of his adoptive parents. On his 66th birthday in 2021, Tim Cook acknowledged this again on a Tweet: