From childhood, they push us to transform our faults into virtues, this passionate emotion into professional enthusiasm. Conversely, any virtue in excess is a recognized defect. Steve Jobs was slow to catch on. Known for his meticulous study of details, he cultivated this virtue for years to the point of almost transforming it into a professional ring. This nature is amply documented by the person who knew him best, Laurene Powell Jobs, who was married to him for 20 years. Of course, it doesn’t seem like it’s always been easy to wear.
A demanding childhood
To understand the rest, it is necessary to go back to the genesis, to the early childhood of Jobs. He was the biological son of Professor Joanne Schieble and her assistant Abdulfattah Jandali.. They met at the University of Wisconsin, and when Joanne got pregnant, they had no choice but to give the child up for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs had been looking for a baby for over a decade. A baby who would end up being named Steven Paul.
Stories from the time say that Jobs was a restless and unruly child. His father, however, was strict and believed in order above all else. “He liked to get it right,” Robin Stevenson recalled of Paul’s obsession with detail. He was the one who gave Jobs the ability to have his own workbench, provided he kept it tidy.
Take this example from his own memories: When Steve was only six years old, his father started building a fence around his garden. “We have to make the back of the fence as beautiful as the front.” To which Steve replied, “why? No one will ever know.” His father said “you will know”. Then would come the bad influences, the days of abuse and arguments. Until he finally finds his place in the world.
Eight years choosing a sofa
Something as simple as choosing a sofa. If you’ve ever seen yourself in a department store trying to decide which one is best for your living room, you know what we’re talking about. But for Steve it was all vital decisions, because they are about you, they are part of a whole
Journalist Kara Swisher has verified that in many interviews with Jobs he always appeared standing or leaning on tables. They weren’t a capricious position, they corresponded to a reality: in his house, he didn’t have a single sofa. Laurene Powell, viuda de Jobs, recuerda así la batalla denttro del matrimonio por elegir sofá: “La gente se burlaba de nosotros porque en nuestra casa no podíamos ponernos de acuerdo en elegir un sofá o sillas. both, mainly because there were a lot of details we had to agree on
These obsessions grew in density and form, reaching such popular anecdotes as, according to The Atlantic, being in the middle of a job interview and saying “the piano in the living room needs to be moved”. But beyond that, It seems that Steve and Laurene were unique during their marriage.
Three decades after this anecdote, Steve Jobs repeated it as a mean rhyme: while developing the circuit board for the first Mac, Jobs told the engineer “I want it to look as good as possible, even if it’s inside the box”. The designer said “the only thing that matters is that it works. No one is looking at a PC board.” Jobs, invoking his own adoptive father, resolved: “a great carpenter will not use lousy wood for the back of a piece of furniture, even if no one will see it“.
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