Steve Jobs Research Paper

Sixty-two years ago on February twenty-fourth a baby boy was given up for adoption in San Francisco. This boy was Steve Jobs, and while he was smart, was also very directionless. In 1976, he started Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak, but not before experimenting with several different pursuits first (“Steve Jobs”). In his parents’ garage in 1976, Jobs became the cofounder of Apple, in ‘85 he was fired from his own company, he came to the rescue in ‘97 to save the company which was on the brink of bankruptcy, and created the world’s most valuable company, all before his untimely death in 2011; his life is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large. Aside from the multi-billion dollar company that Jobs had created, he helped to update and change multiple other industries as well: personal computing, animated movies, retail stores, digital publishing, just to name a few (Isaacson). According to Sue

Halpern, “Jobs had an abiding belief in freedom - his own.”
Due to boredom in elementary school, Jobs turned to pulling pranks, even his teachers had to beg him to get him to study.

Administrators advised Jobs to skip ahead to high school when they got his test scores back, but Jobs’ parents refused (“Steve Jobs”). Once he made it to high school, Jobs asked the President of Hewlett-Packard if he could use some parts for a project he was working on. Hewlett, so impressed with Jobs, gave the young boy more than just project parts; he offered the teenaager a summer internship with his company. It was during this summer that Jobs met a young engineer just five years older than him, this engineer was Steve Wozniak (“An Extraordinary Career”). In 1976 at the age of 21, Jobs and Wozniak created the Apple Computer. The two began in the Jobs family garage, earning their start-up money by Wozniak selling his cherished scientific calculator and Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus (“Steve Jobs”). In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced Apple II: the first personal computer with a keyboard and colored graphics (“An Extraordinary

Career”).
In 2003, a rare but operable form of pancreatic cancer had made its way into Jobs’ pancreas. Jobs chose to weigh Eastern treatment options while altering his pesco-vegetarian diet, rather than immediately having surgery (“Steve Jobs”). Jobs announced via email to all Apple employees that he had finally undergone a procedure to remove a cancerous tumor from his body in mid-2004 (“An Extraordinary Career”). Jobs put off the recommended surgery for nine months when he received the initial diagnosis of his tumor. He obsessively searched for alternative cures, but it too little too late. It seems that the Apple co-founder’s hard-headed arrogance in itself dictated his last act (Adams).
Jobs stayed hungry and foolish all through his career, making sure that the engineering side of his ego was always complemented by a nonconformist hippie aspect from his acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking, artistic rebel that came out every once in awhile (Isaacson). Jobs died in October 2011 at the age of 56, eight years after his diagnosis, and much of the tragedy his shortened life lies in the fact that despite his ability to “think different”, even one of the smartest men in the world found no cure to the single thing that killed him (Adams). From the way he carried himself to the women he dated, Jobs’ behavior reflected the discrepancy and eventual coalescence of all these differing strands (Isaacson).