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Happy 65th Birthday, Steve Jobs: 5 Curious Facts About Apple’s Founder
One of the most iconic business people to have ever lived, a creative genius, a technological visionary, and a ruthless leader, Steve Jobs would be turning 65 this week
While his face and classic polo neck jumper are recognized the world over, here are a few things you might not know about Steve Jobs.
Walking meetings were crucial to his creativity
Close friends, colleagues, and even his biographer, noted that Jobs preferred to walk during his most important meetings. Longtime friend Robert Friedland even added that he was “always walking around barefoot.”
Aristotle to Charles Darwin loved to walk, and fellow Silicon Valley tycoons Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO), Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder), and Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn CEO) also swear by walking meetings.
Research in recent years has suggested that it helps focus the mind and improve creative thinking and problem solving when a problem could have more than one solution.
He profited by deceiving his closest colleague and Apple cofounder
Jobs wasn’t the only Steve to found Apple. The lesser-known Steve Wozniak was a virtuoso computer engineer who almost single-handedly built the company’s first computer, the Apple I.
Before he did that, the pair had already worked with Atari to design a chipset for their game, Breakout. The Steves agreed to split the money 50-50 but Jobs told Wozniak they were getting paid $1,500, when Atari had paid them $5,000.
Wozniak would later admit to crying when he found a decade later that Jobs had taken over $4,000, saying he would’ve given Jobs the money had he said he needed it.
He credited a calligraphy class with setting Apple apart from competitors
Steve dropped out of Stanford, saying he felt he was wasting his parents’ money. That didn’t stop him returning as the keynote speaker at Stanford’s 2005 commencement address.
He kept dropping into a few lectures unofficially. One of those was a calligraphy class.
I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical and artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture.
Steve Jobs
His understanding of typography shaped Apple’s radically stylish fonts. This ethos that considered aesthetics equal to science would be key to the entire company's success.
He never met his biological father
Steve’s father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, made millions, even though he never went to college. You might think he passed those lessons onto his son but Steve never met his father.
His mum became pregnant at 23. Her parents never approved of their Catholic daughter marrying a Syrian-born Muslim. The baby was put up for adoption and taken in by Paul and Clara Jobs.
Although John later found out that Steve was his son, he never sought him out, fearing Jobs would assume he was after the Apple fortune.
He denied paternity of his child
Just like his mother, Steve wasn’t ready to be a parent at the age of 23. When his first girlfriend became pregnant, he told people that she’d been sleeping around and he was infertile.
He continued to deny paternity even after a paternity test showed the girl, Lisa, was his child. He did, however, name one Apple’s desktop computers Lisa.
For years he insisted it was a simple acronym but would later admit it was named after his daughter.
Steve’s genius had an incredible impact on the world but he was, of course, still just a man. In 2011, he passed away due to pancreatic cancer.
On the week of what would have been his 65th birthday (he was born on February 24, 1955), we remember the man behind many of the greatest companies and consumer products the world has ever seen.
Happy Birthday, Steve.
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