Steve Jobs

Introduction

Biography is a story about an individual written by another person. It entails the act of someone recording or writing well-elaborated statements for the purpose of preserving information about a person. A biography should be written after extensive research about the person one intends to write about. The story should be developed according to developmental aims or years so as to make the writing attractive to read and easy to understand. This paper is aimed at writing a biography of Steve Jobs by the use of developmental themes such as family relationship, education journey, and career path to elaborate on his successful life. Steve Paul Job was an American investor and a business magnate. During his time he occupied positions of the chairman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple. In short, Steve Jobs was a man full of achievement, one element that is rare to find and therefore generates anxiety of individuals wanting to know more about his life as a whole hence necessitating this paper.

Family Relationship

Steve Jobs was born in the family of Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble in the year 1955 on the 24^th of February in San Francisco, California, the United States (Giannantonio & Hurley-Hanson, 2016). However, he was set for adoption and was adopted by Paul and Clara Schiebe; therefore, he grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He got married in 1991 to Laurene Powell, and they had four children, one being the famous Lisa Brennan. During his life, Steve Jobs was known to be a great family man for he always followed up the life of his children to the latter. This is one attribute that makes him a unique man because, as it has been recorded in the past, many successful business people have less if any family time. He died at the age of fifty-six on the 5^th of October, 2011. The cause of his death was pancreatic cancer, a disease that did not hinder him from achieving his objective here on earth. Steve was laid to rest in a memorial park known as Alta Mesa Memorial Park.

Elementary Education

Jobs learnt craftsmanship from his adopted father through observation and continued practice for to him his father known every skill involved in the craft. It is from his father that Jobs developed his immeasurable love for electronics. This resulted in him befriending numerous engineers, which helped him develop a high level of IQ as compared to that of his schoolmates. To him, the school was boring because it never gave him the opportunity to handle the sort of complex machines he was used to handling while at home. Therefore, he was having difficulties in functioning in his traditional school setup. This situation of idleness contributed to his habitual acts of playing pranks on his schoolmate in Monta Loma Elementary school in Mountain View (Ma, 2016).

During his fourth grade, Jobs encountered a teacher who satisfied his father’s wish of the school placing enough challenges for his brilliant son by taking him through an advanced fourth-grade class that took him about a month to complete. She also encouraged him to finish the assigned workbook, which contributed greatly to the buildup of his passion for learning new things. His parents transferred him to Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View so that he could skip grade five, as advised by his previous school teacher. However, the new environment was not good enough for Jobs because there he was subjected to a lot of bulling and was branded the name “Socially Awkward Loner” (Giannantonio & Hurley-Hanson, 2016). This was as a result of him not fitting into the new environment for there were few engineers in the area. His loving parents, though not that financially stable, utilized their savings into enrolling him into another school, whose environment was encompassed by numerous engineering families that were best fit for him. This new home that he was enrolled to was declared as the first site for Apple Computer in 2013.

High School

Jobs attended Homestead High School in 1968. The school had had close ties with the well-known Silicon Valley. There Steve Jobs was studying together with his friend Fernandez. The two lacked engineering basis; therefore, they enrolled in John McCollum’s Electronics 1. Jobs had, however, become rebellious (Streeter, 2015). In 1970, Jobs underwent a change after he discovered Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare and other works of classical literature. He also stated that he discovered Plato and King Lear, read Moby Dick, and attended creative writing classes. This helped in changing his lonely nature due to his attending AP English class. This helped him to add another friend to his special list of a friend, Wozniak, who attended University of California, and Jobs used to pay him a number of visits that contributed to him studying in the nearby Stanford University’s student union. He also enrolled in light shows for Homestead’s Avant-garde Jazz program together with his girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan. After completion of the high school, he found an advertisement for a job that required people to dress up as characters from Alice in Wonderland, and he took part in it together with his roommate and friend.

College Live

After high school, he enrolled in Reeds College in 1972, where he made one more friend, Daniel Kottke. However, he dropped out of school in the same year because school was expensive, and he didn’t wish to keep on spending his parent’s savings (Heracleous & Klaering, 2017). During his college time, Steve Jobs was known for his intensive love for LSD and marijuana. He was once told that LCD is one of the two or three most important things that he had done in his life. However, he later declassified FBI reports that stated the above.

Career Path

Steve Job realized his interest in electronics and gadgetry during his high school years. This pushed him to boldly call William Hewlett, the co-founder and president of Hewlett-Packard, to request for parts for a school project he was working on (Giannantonio & Hurley-Hanson, 2016). His confidence impressed William, and he decided to not only give Jobs the parts but also to offer him an internship in the Hewlett-Packard.

After dropping out of college, Steve Jobs went to India to study Eastern culture and find out more about the religious practices there. After returning to the U.S, he met his friend Wozniak, who was at the time trying to build a small computer as a sort of hobby. However, Jobs grasped at the opportunity and requested Wozniak to start a business with him. They worked on generating the Apple 1 and sold it. It generated enough cash, enabling them to improve their design and hence introduced Apple I, the first personal computer with color graphics and a keyboard. Apple II was such a success that it generated a lot of profit for the company. But after some years the company was on a decline due to increased competition between Apple III and LISA, which caused the company to lose almost half of its market to IBM (Heracleous & Klaering, 2017).

The company invented Macintosh, the first personal computer to feature a graphical user interface which was controlled by a mouse. Mac was a useful invention due to its simplicity in usage. It, however, was not a success due to its marketing strategy. Job wanted to sell it as a home computer, and its price was too high. When the sales failed to reach the targeted number, Jobs tried to redesign Macintosh as a business computer, but its features could not sum up to what consumers wanted. This turn of events was a cause of serious trouble for Jobs which has lead him to be ousted out of the board of by CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs appointed to help him run the company (Ma, 2016). After being left out without all the power and control, Jobs eventually sold his shares and resigned.

Having some of the money left from the stock sale, Job launched NeXT Computer Co., aiming to build a computer that could offer a new approach to research and higher education. NeXT was expensive to attract enough sales, causing Job to switch from hardware to software. At that time, he began to pay more attention to his other business, Pixar Animation Studios. He signed a contract with Disney and was set out to create the first-ever computer-animated feature film (Streeter 2015). The ‘Toy Story’ became a hit upon its release.

At this time, Apple bought NeXT and re-appointed Jobs to Apple’s board of directors as the advisor to Gilbert F. Amelio, who held a position of the chairman and CEO. The company directors hoped that he could help running things in the company since their attempts at creating a next-generation Macintosh were unsuccessful. After some time, Apple announced that they had experienced a financial loss, which led to Amelio resigning and Jobs becoming an interim CEO. He signed a deal with Microsoft to secure Apple’s survival. He then installed the G3 PowerPC microprocessor in all Apple computers, making them faster than the competing Pentium PCs. He began the development of the iMac. Under Jobs guidance, the company shifted back to its profitability (Heracleous & Klaering, 2017). Apple was once again successful. This was just the beginning as other innovations rolled out in the next decade, including the iPod, Apple iTunes store, the iPhone handset, and iPad tablet computer. This was a tremendous success to the company as the devices were used worldwide.

Reference

Giannantonio, C. M., & Hurley-Hanson, A. E. (2016). Entrepreneurial characteristics and careers: American high-tech entrepreneurs. Journal of Business & Management, 22(2).

Heracleous, L., & Klaering, L. A. (2017). The circle of life: Rhetoric of identification in Steve Jobs’ Stanford speech. Journal of Business Research, 79, 31-40.

Ma, Y. (2016). Reflections of Steven Jobs: Lessons and guidance for entrepreneurs. International Journal of Education and Social Science, 3(3), 41-48.

Streeter, T. (2015). Steve Jobs, romantic individualism, and the desire for good capitalism. International Journal of Communication, 9, 19.