Childhood Shapes Your Thinking:
Jobs was never interested in cars, but he wanted to hang out with his dad, who emphasized the importance of building quality products, and loved souping up cars. Paul also taught that you should know more than the person you bargain with. Paul Jobs could not successfully get into real-estate because he was unwilling to sell, and be like-able. By his teens, Jobs realized he was smarter than his parents. Steve Jobs was willful, and his parents would go to great lengths to feed Jobs every whim by deferring to his needs. Steve Jobs got into a fight with his dad for smoking marijuana, but by his senior year, Jobs was looking into sleep deprivation, LSD, and other drugs. Steve Jobs became more interested in electronics than in car engineering, in particular the laser technology his father was working at Spectra Physics.
The Interior Matters Just As Much:
For Paul Jobs (Steve Jobs’ adoptive dad), the interior of a product is equally important as the exterior. Eichler Homes were great designs, with a simple capability that was common in Silicon Valley. Working with his dad on cars, the interior lining was just as important as the parts you can see.
Jobs was fascinated by the need for perfection in technology. Later on in the 1980s at Apple, he argued that even if you can’t see something (like the interior of the computer), it should be done well. So Jobs wanted to ensure that the Macintosh mother board was beautiful. To do that, he had members of his team sign the inside of the original Macintosh. Every original Macintosh has the signatures of those who worked on it.
This is an analysis based on Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and other sources of research. Enjoy.
After much research and work, the two Steves created their Blue-Box device which allowed them to call the Pope, Australia, and elsewhere free of charge. Jobs always felt that stealing long-distance calls was fair when a company like Bell was involved. Although it was illegal, Jobs believed they could sell these devices, and they did manage to sell over 100 of them. Jobs did all the pitching of the Blue Box to random people in the Palo Alto area. It was their first real entrepreneurial endeavour. In an illegal market like telephone hacking, however, there were risks. In one encounter, Jobs and Wozniak were robbed of one of these devices by a crazed man who held Jobs and Woz up at gun-point. By doing something illegal, Steve Jobs and Wozniak gained confidence that they could put a product into production. The Blue Box gave them a taste of the combination of engineering and vision. The lesson is that it turns out that crime does pay when the work is the forerunner of something like Apple.