Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs arrived at school already able to read because his mother, Clara, had taught him. The classroom felt slow and controlling. By third grade, he and a friend were rearranging the locks on a hundred bicycles and setting off explosives in teachers' desks. Steve was kicked out repeatedly. He later said school had nearly beaten the curiosity out of him. The energy was there; so was the chance that he would spend it entirely on trouble.

The garage asked something different of him. When Steve was five or six, his father, Paul, marked off a corner of the workbench, handed him small tools, and taught him to build, dismantle, and repair things. Jobs remembered how much time his father spent beside him. The bench did not erase the school behavior. It gave the restless boy work in which patience, accuracy, and even the finish on a hidden surface counted.

In fourth grade, Imogene “Teddy” Hill watched him for two weeks before proposing a deal: finish a mathematics workbook at home, without help, and earn five dollars and a large lollipop. He did it. Before long, the reward no longer mattered. Hill brought him camera-making kits and restored his desire to learn. Testing then led the school to suggest sending him straight to high school. Paul and Clara said no. They allowed him to skip one grade, not several, keeping a sharp academic correction from becoming an extreme social leap.

The next school still went badly. Jobs was bullied and, midway through seventh grade, told his parents he would stop attending if they made him return. Moving was a hard demand for a working-class family. Walter Isaacson's biography, based on extensive interviews with Jobs and people around him, says Paul and Clara researched better districts, scraped together their savings, and bought a modest house in Los Altos. The new school placed Steve among students and neighbors who shared his interest in electronics. By thirteen, he was building a frequency counter and had talked his way into a summer job at Hewlett-Packard.

Jobs later said, “If I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail.” He named Hill as decisive. His parents' work was quieter and longer: teaching, building beside him, rejecting one school recommendation, then uprooting the household when the next setting became untenable. Jobs went on to cofound Apple and help build Pixar. His harsh treatment of colleagues and failures in his own family life also belong in an honest account. Childhood support did not make every later choice admirable. It kept a difficult child connected to adults, demanding work, and a school path long enough for his abilities to become visible.