13A Reading Reflection No. 1

I chose to write about the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. This biography contains information about all walks of Steve Jobs’ life, from his childhood, to his education, to his career, to the end of his life. I learned a lot of things about Steve Jobs that I have never heard before, despite having previously felt like I had heard a lot about this man and his career. I had never known that he was adopted, as he was put up for adoption because his biological parents’ relationship was deemed unacceptable because of their backgrounds. The book regards Steve Jobs feelings of himself during his early life as “Abandoned. Chosen. Special.” I find this to be a desolate, yet hopeful way of viewing the situation.

I was surprised to learn that Steve Jobs experimented with drugs in high school and was not what one would consider a “straight edge” kid. I admire that although this was his beginning, he did not make it his end. Although he dropped out of Reed College where he attended school, he is still one of the most prominent names in technology. This clearly shows that Jobs encountered failure in his life, even from early on. As a young college student, it is hard to face the idea of dropping out and not being able to finish what you started. However, it appears Jobs did not see it as such, but rather as an opportunity to create something different for himself that would be profitable and more in tune with his preferences.

I noticed that Steve Jobs seems like a free spirited individual. Based on the reading, it seems that he did whatever he felt like doing whenever he felt like doing it, especially in his earlier years surrounding his departure from formal college. This is a beneficial character trait that not many people have, because Jobs had the ability to stop what he was doing to pursue something else if it seemed to be more suitable to him.

I thought it was funny that the origins of the brand name Apple come from the fact that Jobs was physically at an apple orchard when he was deriving a name for the startup computer business him and co-worker Wozniak were creating. I also noted the slight pettiness, for lack of better words, that Jobs chose the name Apple because it came before Atari in the dictionary, his previous employer.

I think that Steve Jobs very much knows the value of hard work, and what is means to be a dedicated and diligent worker when there is a task at hand. In the reading, it said that Jobs and Wozniak made 100 computers of the version Apple I in just one month, making the computers profitable in only thirty days. When the Apple II was released, with the sought-after help of a millionaire friend for financing and publicity, it sold over 6 million units.

One part of the reading that I found confusing but also interesting occurred in chapter 8, where Steve Jobs quotes “Picasso had a saying, ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’, and we had never been shameless about stealing great ideas.” I found this strange because for a man of great dignity and poise in his later years, that’s an interesting thing to admit. I also thought it was confusing that Steve Jobs personality clashed with a lot of people, so much so that he was demoted and not allowed to manage major projects within Apple during the 1980’s.

If I could ask a question, I would first ask about the part of the book where it states that Jobs paid some of his earliest employees on an hourly basis and not salary basis, despite that he was worth over $200 million at the time. It states that partner Wozniak gave many of his stocks to these people, but I wonder why that was the scenario in the first place.

I would also ask about this so called “reality distortion field,” as people called it, where they said that Jobs could convince people that anything was possible by “distorting reality.” This begs some questions of ethics in my mind, along with the quote by jobs that there are only two kinds of people, you were either “enlightened or an asshole.”