The Monk Who Sold Computers

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. That’s the mark of a true professional” Gautama Buddha

"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it," said President Barack Obama in a statement. “Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: He changed the way each of us sees the world.”

Steve Jobs, for all of his single-minded dedication to the company he built from the ground up, he actually skipped a meeting to take Laurene on their first date: Steve wrote “I was in the parking lot with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, ‘If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman?’ I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we’ve been together ever since.”

He wrote to Laurene. “We didn’t know much about each other 20 years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago-older, wiser-with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.” (As recited to biographer Walter Isaacson. Jobs was said to have cried uncontrollably after the recitation.)

In his famous 2005 commencement speech to Stanford University, Jobs said of his time at Reed: "It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5 cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple."

Steve Jobs is the man who gave the most popular personal gadgets to this generation, the Apple gadgets iMac, iPhone, iPod and iPad; and convinced us to splash out up to $800 again and again on gadgets we never knew we really required. The business world is missing one of its most popular visionaries.

According to Steve Jobs, Apple was so named because Jobs was coming back from an apple farm, and he was on a fruitarian diet. He thought the name was "fun, spirited and not intimidating". May be, Isaac Newton’s apple fell on his head!! Jobs is counted among the world’s greatest CEOs and inventors, revered not just for his vision, but creativity, business savvy, and aesthetic appreciation.

As the CEO of the world's most valuable brand, Jobs took only, an annual salary of just $1. While the gesture isn't unheard of in the corporate; Jobs has kept his salary at $1 since 1997, the year he became Apple's lead executive. Of his salary, Jobs joked in 2007: "I get 50 cents a year for showing up, and the other 50 cents is based on my performance."

Since the founding of Apple Computer in 1976, fans and the media grasped for any hint at the personal life of the man in the black turtleneck, trying to piece together what they could of the reclusive innovator. For decades, Jobs, thought to be worth more than $5 billion, has tried to put a metaphorical black sheet over his private life. As with his rollercoaster business career, his personal life has had its ups and downs. Though he was one of the world's most famous CEOs, Steve Jobs kept his private world -- wife and family, illegitimate daughter, father who gave him up for adoption, long lost sister -- hidden from public view.

Jobs most public display of a personal life included his wife, Laurene Powell, and their three children: Reed Paul, Erin Sienna, and Eve. Powell and Jobs had been married for more than 20 years. The two were married in a small Buddhist ceremony in Yosemite National Park in 1991, and lived in Woodside, Calif; the marriage was officiated by Kobin Chino, a Zen Buddhist monk who was his spiritual guru.

Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955. His biological father was a graduate student named Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian Muslim who left native country at the age 18 and mother named Joanne Schieble. Jandali,  claimed they put him up for adoption because Joanne’s father was extremely conservative and wouldn’t let Jandali marry her. His birth mother, Joanne Simpson, was a graduate student at the time and later a speech pathologist; his biological father, Abdulfattah John Jandali, reportedly now serves as the vice president of a Reno, Nevada casino.

He was placed with a private adoption agency. He was adopted shortly after his birth and reared near Mountain View, California by a working-class couple, Paul Reinhold Jobs (1922–1993) and Clara Jobs (1924–1986). Joanne tried to insist their son went to university-educated parents. Neither Paul Jobs, a machine operator, nor his wife could make such a claim: his mother only signed the papers after they promised to send him to university.

A few months after they gave Steve up Joanne’s dad died and she was free to marry John. The couple went on to have a daughter, Mona, but eventually split up and divorced when John was managing a refinery in Syria. Mona is estranged from John too. 

Later in life, Jobs discovered the identities of his estranged parents. While Jobs reconnected with Simpson in later years, he and his biological father remained estranged. Some have claimed that Jobs’s absent real father may be crucial in explaining his contradictory and sometimes combative personality.

The reasons for that estrangement are not known. But their split has echoes in another episode in Jobs’s complicated personal life. In 1977, his on-off girlfriend Chris-Ann Brennan gave birth to their daughter, Lisa. Jobs initially insisted the girl was not his. Even so, he named an early Apple computer Lisa (which he claimed was only a technical acronym). Ms Brennan initially raised Lisa on benefits, and those who knew about Jobs’s own adoption were shocked at his response. During Lisa’s teens, however, Jobs acknowledged paternity, and she came to live with him before he paid for her college education at Harvard. Now 34, she is a writer based in New York. Jobs' reluctance to accept Lisa is ironic since he was given up for adoption as a child and has refused to speak to his biological father, despite the father's efforts to contact Jobs. "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of," he said in a statement while promoting his authorized biography, "such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.”

Later in his life, Jobs crossed paths with his biological sister while seeking the identity of his birth parents. His sister, Mona Simpson (born Mona Jandali), is the well-known author of "Anywhere But Here" — a story about a mother and daughter that was later adapted into a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon.

After reuniting, Jobs and Simpson developed a close relationship. Of his sister, he told a New York Times interviewer: "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days.''Anywhere But Here" is dedicated to "my brother Steve."

Born out of wedlock and given away for adoption as an infant, the early life of Steve Jobs was one characterised by a search for his inner self and possibly, emotional turmoil. He also had a sting of affairs, most notably with American folk singer Joan Baez and Hollywood actress Diane Keaton. While the inner search led him to eastern mysticism, culminating in a trip to India in 1973, during the trip to India, Jobs visited a well-known ashram and returned to the U.S. as a Zen Buddhist.

Fulfilling his biological mother's dream, Jobs graduated from high school and at 17 enrolled at Reed College in Portland. He dropped out, unable to justify to himself the financial burden on his parents. Not seeing the value in his education, Jobs dropped out after six months but continued to audit classes, sleeping on the floors of friends' dorms, redeeming 5-cent Coke bottle deposits for food money and getting Sunday meals at the Hare Krishna temple. And taking sporadic courses including one in calligraphy, which molded his fixation with simplicity and design. Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

In 1974, Jobs headed back to California and found a job with Atari, the video-game manufacturer. Jobs is well known for his innovations in personal computing, mobile tech, and software, but he also helped create one of the best known video games of all-time. In 1975, Jobs was tapped by Atari to work on the Pong-like game Breakout.

Jobs, founded Apple Computer Inc. in his parents' garage in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, an engineering whiz who had recently dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley. The two joined forces and, in pairing Wozniak's engineering brilliance with Jobs' vision and business sense, launched the company that gave the world the first personal computer.

Through his successes and public losses, Jobs maintained that fulfillment comes from pursuing what you love.

Just two miles from Apple’s offices is the garage next to his childhood family home, a cream-coloured suburban bungalow, where he and his friend Steve Wozniak founded the company in 1976. They had met in an introductory electronics class at Homestead high school half-way between the two. And a short drive up the highway lie the grounds of Stanford University, where in 1975 the duo revealed Apple I, the world’s first personal computer, to 30 or so enthusiasts from the Homebrew Computer Club.

Jobs subsequently dated the singer Joan Baez and actress Diane Keaton. Then in 1989, he was invited to address the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where one of the event organisers was Laurene Powell, a blonde, bright and attractive former New York investment banker eight years his junior, who was studying for her master’s degree. The speech developed into an impromptu date and quickly a relationship. She graduated and got her MBA at Stanford Business School.

To be sure, many of the gifts that would drive Apple's resurrection over the past decade were already evident in the 1980s: the marketing showmanship, the inspirational summons to "put a dent in the universe," the siren call to talent. Engineer Bob Belleville recalls Jobs recruiting him in 1982 with the words: "I hear you're great, but everything you've done so far is crap. Come work for me." Jobs famously seduced Sculley to Apple by challenging him: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" But in 1985, after convincing former Pepsi executive John Sculley to join Apple as its CEO, Jobs found himself struggling to hold on to the company he helped create. After differences over how to run the company, Sculley and the Apple board pushed Jobs out.

Only 30 years old and, forced to start over again, Jobs founded NeXT Computer and Pixar. Although NeXT failed to live up to Jobs' hopes of building a personal computer to rival Apple's, after eight years, it brought him full circle. In 1996 Apple's acquisition of NeXT was finalized, and, less than a year later, Jobs reprised his role as the company's CEO.

Sculley in his memoir, dismissed Jobs' vision for the company. "Apple was supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company," Sculley wrote. "This was a lunatic plan. High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product." Of course, Sculley was dead wrong.

Job's return to Apple—described as his "second coming" by followers in the so-called “cult of Apple”—restored the company's profitability and customers' interest in its products. After a decline in revenues in 1997, the company rebounded in 1998 with three profitable quarters in a row.

"Steve did an excellent job of melding the marketing, operations, and technology. He understood which technology was good and what people would like," Wozniak told students at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School in 2008.

Since his return to Apple, the company has unleashed a string of critically acclaimed products. The iMac, launched in 1998, signaled Apple's rebirth and was called an "industry-changing success" by Forbes. The iPod, released in 2001, turned the music industry on its head, and paved the way for iTunes, the iPhone, and iPad.

He may only have taken in a single dollar per year, but Jobs leaves behind a vast fortune. The largest chunk of that wealth is the roughly $7 billion from the sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006. In 2011, with an estimated net worth of $8.3 billion, he was the 110th richest person in the world, according to Forbes. If Jobs hadn't sold his shares upon leaving Apple in 1985 (before returning to the company in 1996), he would have been the world's fifth richest individual.

Reflecting on his cancer diagnosis, in a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, he said: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

But, over the past three decades, Apple's reach has extended far beyond personal computers to transform the way people consume and create media and connect with one another.

It is the ultimate American story of the self-made man. And, as if any confirmation were needed that it was also made for Hollywood, Sony studios are this weekend reportedly set to acquire the film rights to his highly anticipated authorised biography. The book, by Walter Isaacson, is already number one in the Amazon charts, two weeks ahead of its release.

"Your time is limited," he told the grads at Stanford, "so don't waste it living someone else's life."