There was a man that moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block, who was new in the neighborhood with his wife. It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up. I remember almost every day the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other. Silicon Valley, for the most part, at that time, was still orchards-apricot orchards and prune orchards-and it was really paradise. My dad got transferred, and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley, so there were engineers all around. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that. He did not have a deep understanding of electronics himself, but he’d encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things that he would fix. One of the things that he touched upon was electronics. He spent a lot of time with me, teaching me how to build things, take things apart, put things back together. He had a workbench out in the garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said, “Steve, this is your workbench now.” And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. He was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands. He joined the Coast Guard in World War II and ferried troops around the world for General Patton, and I think he was always getting into trouble and getting busted down to Private. I had a father, named Paul, who was a pretty remarkable man. In 1995, he recorded an oral history for the Smithsonian. It was a time when engineers and programmers began flooding into what came to be known as Silicon Valley. He later called computers “a bicycle of the mind.” Preface: Steve on His Childhood and Young Adulthood Steve typically kept his personal life private, but he did occasionally talk about growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area. ✂ indicates that several sentences or paragraphs have been removed from the original. Edited by Leslie Berlin Published by the Steve Jobs ArchiveĬontents have been edited and excerpted for clarity and privacy. I hope these selections ignite in you the understanding that drove him: that everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter, no more capable, than we are that our world is not fixed-and so we can change it for the better. But always, always, he retains that sense of possibility. In these pages, Steve drafts and refines. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility. Quite the contrary: he imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. Steve’s gift was greater still: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. It is hard enough to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence, animated by the thought that he-or that any of us-might elevate or expedite human progress. Steve once told a group of students, “You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. Much of what’s in these pages reflects guiding themes of Steve’s life: his sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the arts and technology his unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself his tenacity in pursuit of assembling and leading great teams and perhaps, above all, his insights into what it means to be human. His words-in speeches, interviews, and emails-offer a window into how he thought. And the best way to understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life. The best way to understand a person is to listen to that person directly. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. You never hear their story or tell yours. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.Īnd you never meet the people. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. Make Something Wonderful Steve Jobs in his own words
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