Steve Jobs: a Wizard, Not a College Dropout

It's impossible to begin to understand the sources of Jobs's success without looking to his unusual life story. Both his heroic posture as an inspired crusader striving to change the world and his famed passion for thinking differently sprang from the circumstances of his upbringing: like the fictional Harry Potter, he was a misfit, raised by adoptive parents who ultimately discovered that he was a wizard among the muggles. Jobs was born out of wedlock to two wizards, a.k.a. graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison: Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian immigrant pursuing his doctorate in political science, and Joanne Simpson, who was studying for her master's in speech. He was adopted at birth by Paul and Clara Jobs of San Francisco. Unlike Harry Potter's guardians, the Jobses were loving, supportive parents, but they were muggles nonetheless-working-class folks rather than the rarefied breed of intellectuals and artists that the teenage Steve envisioned as his own true identity.
Four of the hallmarks of Jobs's future business career --- his extraordinary persuasiveness, his constant risk taking, his rare deal-making ability, and his fierce perfectionism --- can be traced to his teenage years. The first three are sharply illustrated by his brief episode as a college student: Jobs would become known as one of the most famous college dropouts of our times, along with Microsoft's Bill Gates and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
But in Jobs's case the "dropout" image is all wrong. He was actually a "drop-in": he matriculated at Portland's Reed College, a bastion of the counterculture and leftist artsy intellectualism, even though he knew his parents couldn't--and wouldn't--pick up the tab. When the first bill came due and went unpaid, Jobs talked the dean of students into letting him stay in the dorms and attend classes for free. That's how strongly he wanted to be at an elite school and obtain its validation that he was indeed a wizard rather than a muggle. And that's how good he was at persuasion and deal-making --- and how open to real risk...


Source: Newsweek Magazine
September 5, 2011 issue