The Story of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955. His parents could not raise him, so he was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a warm and ordinary family. His father fixed old cars in the garage, and little Steve watched him work. That is where he first learned to love making things.

Jobs went to college, but he dropped out after only six months. He said the classes were not interesting. But he kept going to one class he loved: calligraphy, the art of beautiful handwriting. It looked useless at the time. Years later, it became the reason why computer letters could look beautiful.

In 1976, Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak started Apple in the family garage. They built a small computer and sold it by hand. The company grew fast. But in 1985, after a big fight with his managers, Jobs was fired from the very company he had created. He called it the worst moment of his life.

But Jobs did not give up. He started a new company called NeXT, and he bought a small film studio called Pixar. Pixar made Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated movie, and it was a huge success. In 1997, Apple was in trouble and asked Jobs to come back. He did — and brought the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad to the world.

Jobs died in 2011, at only 56 years old. At a famous speech at Stanford, he told young people: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” Looking back, he said you cannot connect the dots forward — you can only see how they connect when you look back. The boring class, the garage, the firing: every dot mattered.