I've already mentioned that the first chapter in the book Steve Jobs was about his childhood and how he came to think he was "special" and whatever else that puts in your mind when you think you have been chosen to be "special."
Well the Western world is propbably devouring the new book out on Steve Jobs - His Life and etc.
Some of you may not desire to read a 600 or so page book, so I'll post a little here and there about this now famous man.
We pick up his life as a College age young guy.
TWO ODD STEVES MEET
While a student in McCollum's class, jobs became friends
with a graduate who was the teacher's all-time favorite and a
school legend for his wizardry in the class. Stephen Wozniak,
whose younger brother had been on a swim team with Jobs, was
almost five years older than Jobs and far more knowledgeable
about electronics. But emotionally and socially he was still a
high school geek.
Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father's knee. But
their lessons were different. Paul Jobs was a high school dropout
who, when fixing up cars, knew how to turn a tidy profit by
striking the right deal on parts. Francis Wozniak, known as
Jerry, was a brilliant engineering graduate from Cal Tech, where
he had quarterbacked the football team, who became a rocket
scientist at Lockheed. He exalted engineering and looked down on
those in business, marketing, and sales. "I remember him telling
me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could
reach in the world," Steve Wozniak later recalled. "It takes
society to a new level." .....
Woz's father taught him something else that became ingrained
in his childlike, socially awkward personality: Never lie. "My
dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. That's the biggest
thing he taught me. I never lie, even to this day." (The only
partial exception was in the service of a good practical joke.)
In addition, he imbued his son with an aversion to extreme
ambition, which set Woz apart from Jobs. At an Apple product
launch event in 2010, forty years after they met, Woz reflected
on their differences. "My father told me, 'You always want to be
in the middle,'" he said. "I didn't want to be up with the
high-level people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that's
what I wanted to be. I was way too shy ever to be a business
leader like Steve." .....
THE DROPOUT
Turn On, Tune In ...
Chrisann Brennan
Toward the end of his senior year at Homestead, in the
spring of 1972, Jobs started going out with a girl named Chrisann
Brennan, who was about his age but still a junior. With her light
brown hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, and fragile aura, she
was very attractive. She was also enduring the breakup of her
parents' marriage, which made her vulnerable. "We worked together
on an animated movie, then started going out, and she became my
first real girlfriend," Jobs recalled. As Brennan later said,
"Steve was kind of crazy. That's why I was attracted to him."
Jobs's craziness was of the cultivated sort. He had begun his
lifelong experiments with compulsive diets, eating only fruits
and vegetables, so he was as lean and tight as a whippet. He
learned to stare at people without blinking, and he perfected
long silences punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking. This
odd mix of intensity and aloofness, combined with his
shoulder-length hair and scraggly beard, gave him the aura of a
crazed shaman. He oscillated between charismatic and creepy. "He
shuffled around and looked half-mad," recalled Brennan. "He had a
lot of angst. It was like a big darkness around him."
Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan
on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It
was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach.
All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most
wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the
conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat."
That summer of 1972, after his graduation, he and Brennan
moved to a cabin in the hills above Los Altos. "I'm going to go
live in a cabin with Chrisann," he announced to his parents one
day. His father was furious. "No you're not," he said. "Over my
dead body." They had recently fought about marijuana, and once
again the younger Jobs was willful. He just said good-bye and
walked out.....
Brennan spent a lot of her time that summer painting; she
was talented, and she did a picture of a clown for Jobs that he
kept on the wall. Jobs wrote poetry and played guitar. He could
be brutally cold and rude to her at times, but he was also
entrancing and able to impose his will. "He was an enlightened
being who was cruel," she recalled. "That's a strange
combination."
Midway through the summer, Jobs was almost killed when his
red Fiat caught fire. He was driving on Skyline Boulevard in the
Santa Cruz Mountains with a high school friend, Tim Brown, who
looked back, saw flames coming from the engine, and casually said
to Jobs, "Pull over, your car is on fire." Jobs did. His father,
despite their arguments, drove out to the hills to tow the Fiat
home.
In order to find a way to make money for a new car, Jobs got
Wozniak to drive him to De Anza College to look on the
help-wanted bulletin board. They discovered that the Westgate
Shopping Center in San Jose was seeking college students who
could dress up in costumes and amuse the kids. So for $3 an hour,
Jobs, Wozniak, and Brennan donned heavy full-body costumes and
headgear to play Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and the
White Rabbit. Wozniak, in his earnest and sweet way, found it
fun. "I said, 'I want to do it, it's my chance, because I love
children.' I think Steve looked at it as a lousy job, but I
looked at it as a fun adventure." Jobs did indeed find it a pain.
"It was hot, the costumes were heavy, and after a while I felt
like I wanted to smack some of the kids." Patience was never one
of his virtues.
Another book that deeply influenced Jobs during his freshman
year was "Diet for a Small Planet" by Frances Moore Lappe, which
extolled the personal and planetary benefits of vegetarianism.
"That's when I swore off meat pretty much for good," he recalled.
But the book also reinforced his tendency to embrace extreme
diets, which included purges, fasts, or eating only one or two
foods, such as carrots or apples, for weeks on end.
Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians during their
freshman year. "Steve got into it even more than I did," said
Kottke. "He was living off Roman Meal cereal." They would go
shopping at a farmers' co-op, where Jobs would buy a box of
cereal, which would last a week, and other bulk health food. "He
would buy flats of dates and almonds and lots of carrots, and he
got a Champion juicer and we'd make carrot juice and carrot
salads. There is a story about Steve turning orange from eating
so many carrots, and there is some truth to that." Friends
remember him having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue.
Jobs's dietary habits became even more obsessive when he
read "Mucusless Diet Healing System" by Arnold Ehret, an early
twentieth-century German-born nutrition fanatic. He believed in
eating nothing but fruits and starchless vegetables, which he
said prevented the body from forming harmful mucus, and he
advocated cleansing the body regularly through prolonged fasts.
That meant the end of even Roman Meal cereal - or any bread,
grains, or milk. Jobs began warning friends of the mucus dangers
lurking in their bagels. "I got into it in my typical nutso way,"
he said. At one point he and Kottke went for an entire week
eating only apples, and then Jobs began to try even purer fasts.
He started with two-day fasts, and eventually tried to stretch
them to a week or more, breaking them carefully with large
amounts of water and leafy vegetables. "After a week you start to
feel fantastic," he said. "You get a ton of vitality from not
having to digest all this food. I was in great shape. I felt I
could get up and walk to San Francisco anytime I wanted."
Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality,
acid and rock Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the
multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenmen-seeking
campus subculture of the era. And even though he barely indulged
it at Reed, there being charismatic to being a con man," Jobs
said. "It was a strange thing to have one of the spiritual people
in your young life turn out to be, symbolically and in reality, a
gold miner." ...
... Drop Out
Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at
Reed, just not taking the required classes. In fact he was
surprised when he found out that, for all of its hippie aura,
there were strict course requirements. When Wozniak came to
visit, Jobs waved his schedule at him and complained, "They are
making me take all these courses." Woz replied, "Yes, that's what
they do in college." Jobs refused to go to the classes he was
assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted, such as a dance
class where he could enjoy both the creativity and the chance to
meet girls. "I would never have refused to take the courses you
were supposed to, that's a difference in our personality" Wozniak
marveled.
Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about
spending so much of his parents' money on an education that did
not seem worthwhile. "All of my working-class parents' savings
were being spent on my college tuition," he recounted in a famous
commencement address at Stanford. "I had no idea what I wanted to
do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me
figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my
parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and
trust that it would all work out okay."
He didn't actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to
quit paying tuition and taking classes that didn't interest him.
Remarkably, Reed tolerated that. "He had a very inquiring mind
that was enormously attractive," said the dean of students, Jack
Dudman. "He refused to accept automatically received truths, and
he wanted to examine everything himself." Dudman allowed Jobs to
audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he
stopped paying tuition.
"The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required
classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the
ones that looked interesting," he said. Among them was a
calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on
campus that were beautifully drawn. "I learned about serif and
sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between
different letter combinations, about what makes great typography
great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way
that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating."
It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning
himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of
his products, technology would be married to great design,
elegance, human touches, and even romance. He would be in the
fore of pushing friendly graphical user interfaces. The
calligraphy course would become iconic in that regard. "If I had
never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would
have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no
personal computer would have them."
In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian existence on the
fringes of Reed. He went barefoot most of the time, wearing
sandals when it snowed. Elizabeth Holmes made meals for him,
trying to keep up with his obsessive diets. He returned soda
bottles for spare change, continued his treks to the free Sunday
dinners at the Hare Krishna temple, and wore a down jacket in the
heatless garage apartment he rented for $20 a month. When he
needed money, he found work at the psychology department lab
maintaining the electronic equipment that was used for animal
behavior experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan would come to
visit. Their relationship sputtered along erratically. But mostly
he tended to the stirrings of his own soul and personal quest for
enlightenment.
"I came of age at a magical time," he reflected later. "Our
consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD." Even later in
life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more
enlightened. "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the
most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's
another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears
off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was
important - creating great things instead of making money,
putting things back into the stream of history and of human
consciousness as much as I could."
..........
More at another time about the life of Steve Jobs.
Well we see from all of this that Jobs was not so much out of
step with all the Hippies, and John Lenin geeks of practice this
and practice that, seek this and seek that, have this fad and
that fad, experiment with this drug and that drug, bend your
mind this way and that way, with this thing or that thing. But he
was fortunate to meet the "other Steve" that had the tech
knowledge that would be so greatly needed by Jobs in creating his
Apple computer.
And it may have been those years of "strange" experimental
"diets" he got into that years later would maybe have contributed
to his body becoming weak and setting himself up for cancer.
Sometimes it is years later that our physical body shows the
results of our silly, extreme, and strange ways we get into
living, as younger persons. I cannot of course say dogmatically
this was the case, and the reason Jobs came down with cancer. But
I can say this: God never intended us to get into ways of
physically living that are to be blunt, stupid, crazy, fanatical,
and just darn out and out silly and imbalanaced.
......
No comments:
Post a Comment