📱 Steve Jobs

Unusual Beginnings

Steve Jobs was born on 24 February 1955 in San Francisco and adopted by a working-class couple who promised his birth mother he would attend college. He did — for six months. Dropping out of Reed College, he slept on friends' floors, returned Coke bottles for food money, and audited only classes that fascinated him — including calligraphy, 'useless' knowledge that a decade later gave the Macintosh its beautiful fonts. 'You can't connect the dots looking forward,' he later said, 'only looking backwards.'

The Garage and the Fall

In 1976, aged 21, Jobs co-founded Apple with engineer Steve Wozniak in his parents' garage. The Apple II made personal computers a real industry; the 1984 Macintosh gave them a face — icons, windows, a mouse. Then came the humiliation: in 1985, aged 30, Jobs was fired from his own company. Instead of sinking, he built NeXT and bought a small graphics team he renamed Pixar — which created 'Toy Story' and redefined animation.

The Greatest Comeback in Business

In 1997 Apple, near bankruptcy, bought NeXT and brought Jobs home. What followed is business legend: the candy-coloured iMac, then the iPod ('1,000 songs in your pocket'), the iPhone in 2007 — which put the internet, camera, and computer into one slab of glass and changed daily life on Earth — and the iPad. Apple grew from near-death into the most valuable company in the world. His secret was taste: technology married to art, and the courage to say no to a thousand things.

The Final Lesson

Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Jobs gave the 2005 Stanford speech that millions still watch: three stories ending with 'Stay hungry, stay foolish.' He died in 2011 at 56. Every smartphone rectangle in every pocket on the planet carries his fingerprint.

What We Can Learn

• Collect interesting dots — calligraphy became fonts; taste became trillions.
• Getting fired can be freedom in disguise: NeXT and Pixar were built in 'exile'.
• Focus means saying no — simplicity is the hardest sophistication.