Steve Jobs: Against all odds

I don’t have an iPhone, an iPad or an iMac, nor am I planning to get any soon.

I got an iPod for Christmas but, after listening to it once, I decided I did not want to shut off the world, unless I was on the treadmill.

But, as Steve Jobs battled pancreatic cancer, I rallied for him like everybody else. I had hoped he would recover that, somehow, with the best doctors in the world and with his healthy diet (he did not eat meat), he would defy the odds.

When he died, I joined the rest of the world in mourning.

Accolades have been heaped on Jobs through the years. With his death, these have turned into paeans, and he has now been elevated practically to the level of sainthood.

Superlatives adorn each write-up (including this). Jobs is now hailed as a visionary, a pioneer, a genius. His gadgets, people agree, have revolutionized, transformed, remade the world.

He was. And they have.

But these are not the reasons I admire Jobs. I mourn his passing because he was one of the few people in this world who succeeded in being the best they could be.

Humble beginnings

Steven Paul Jobs was born 56 years ago to Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian Muslim immigrant to the United States, and Joanne Schieble, an American with Swiss and German roots.

Schieble’s parents allegedly did not want their daughter to marry a Syrian. Her baby was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, who lived in California. The Jobs couple later died of lung cancer.

Jandali, a former political science professor, is vice-president at a casino in Nevada.  Schieble became a speech pathologist. The couple later married, producing a daughter, the novelist Mona Simpson.

Jobs and Simpson met in the mid-1980s, and the biological siblings became close.

Despite his troubled background, Jobs did not indulge in anger or self-pity. He never used his adoption, his natural parents’ abandonment, or his adoptive parents’ deaths as an excuse for anything.

In later years, he renewed his ties with Schieble, though reportedly not with Jandali.

Jobs never tried to hide his mixed heritage. He never flaunted it either. Unlike insecure or self-conscious people, especially after 9/11, Jobs never denied his Syrian ancestry. He was comfortable with who he was, and saw nothing to be ashamed of.

Dropout

In high school, Jobs attended lectures after class at the Hewlett-Packard Company, where he met Steve Wozniak, who would later be a co-founder of Apple.

Jobs enrolled in Reed College but dropped out after one semester, reportedly because his adoptive parents Paul, a machinist, and Clara, a homemaker, could not afford to pay the tuition.

But Jobs was self-motivated. After dropping out, he audited classes while sleeping at friends’ rooms and getting free meals at the nearby Hare Krishna temple. To earn extra money, he would return Coke bottles and cans.

Poverty was never a hindrance for Jobs. Even when he was forced to drop out of school, he attended as many classes as he could afford. To make ends meet, he did not steal or cheat, but disciplined himself and saved as much as he could.

He had big dreams, and nothing was going to stop him from achieving them.

Perhaps because of Hare Krishna, Jobs traveled to India to gain spiritual enlightenment. To pay for the trip, he took a job at Atari, then the leading video game maker.

In India, Jobs visited an ashram and became a staunch Buddhist, returning to the US with his head shaved.

In 1976, with Ronald Wayne, Jobs and Wozniak launched their own company, Apple Computer.

Fired

What happened next is well-known. Apple was successful in the beginning, but because of many factors (including Jobs’ perfectionist and domineering personality), internal conflicts arose, and he was fired from his own company in 1984.

Instead of falling into depression, Jobs picked himself up yet again.  Years later, he would claim that being fired was the best thing that ever happened to him, because it “freed [him] to enter one of the most creative periods of [his] life.”

Centuries ago, Thomas Edison famously quipped that “genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” His light bulb was the result of hundreds of failures.

Jobs was more like Edison than Einstein. Just as Edison thrived on failure, so did Jobs. Like Edison, nothing fazed Jobs.

After founding NeXT Computer, Jobs bought The Graphics Group from Lucasfilm and remade it into Pixar. A string of animated film hits followed. In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back into the company and becoming its savior.

The rest is history.

As a modern American, Jobs enjoyed the fruits of his labor. But despite his Washington mansion and Mercedes Benz, he was never much into the trappings of wealth.

His salary in Apple was one dollar a year. He dressed in black turtleneck, Levi’s jeans, and New Balance sneakers (perfect for someone who had better things to do than waste time on clothes).

His funeral on October 7 was small, intimate and private, which was what he had wanted.

I will miss Jobs, and his courage, strength and resilience.

E-mail the author at [email protected].