Here is an excerpt of an article about Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s biography, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader (2015) that I came upon at the celebritychest5 website. It reveals ten interesting facts about one of the most interesting — at times most infuriating — business geniuses who ever lived. Walt Whitman once said of himself that he was “large” and contained “multitudes.” That is certainly true of Steve Jobs, also. Here are four of the ten interesting facts about him.
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He didn’t like firing people especially after he had kids. After Steve Jobs had children, he found it much more difficult to fire people. Here’s what he said, according to the book: “When I look at people when this happens, I also think of them as being 5 years old, kind of like I look at my kids. And I think that that could be me coming home to tell my wife and kids that I just got laid off. Or that it could be one of my kids in 20 years.”
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He almost skipped two grades in middle school. Steve skipped sixth grade altogether, and his teachers even considered having him bypass seventh grade, too. After that, his parents decided that it was time for him to attend a better, more challenging school. They moved to an area of Los Altos that had one of the best school districts in California.
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His father was one of his biggest inspirations. Steve Jobs’s father taught him the importance of paying attention to detail, as Schlender and Tetzeli explain. Paul Jobs was a mechanic and a craftsman, and he often rebuilt cars on his weekends. He gave Steve his own small workbench when he was about five or six years old and said: “Steve, this is your workbench now.”
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He would back down if the people he respected asked him to. Jobs was a great visionary, but he also had a temper at times. He wasn’t the easiest person to work for. But if the engineers he respected on the Mac team told him to back off, he would. For example, if Jobs chewed out an engineer for not doing the work he expected, the team would say, “Hey, come on, there aren’t that many people we can hire that are near as good as that guy, go back and apologize,” Bill Gates told Schlender and Tetzeli in reference to Jobs.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American information technology entrepreneur and inventor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc.; CEO and largest shareholder of Pixar Animation Studios; a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT Inc. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.