Update on Steve Jobs

Earlier this month, I wrote about Steve Jobs and how he's been shamelessly used as a poster child for anti-abortionists, without anyone knowing if he was pro-choice or pro-life (though being part hippie-free-thinker-rebel, my guess is the former).

Tonight, 60-Minutes, CBS, aired a segment featuring the author of Jobs' biography, Walter Isaacson, with excerpts of tapped interviews in Jobs own voice.

He spoke of the the first time he told someone he was adopted.


JOBS: I was, I remember right here on my lawn, telling Lisa McMoylar from across the street that I was adopted. And she said, "So does that mean your real parents didn't want you?" Ooooh, lightning bolts went off in my head. I remember running into the house, I think I was like crying, asking my parents. And they sat me down and they said, "No, you don't understand. We specifically picked you out."

ISAACSON: He said, "From then on, I realized that I was not — just abandoned. I was chosen. I was special." And I think that's the key to understanding Steve Jobs.
Isaacson relates much of Jobs personality and behavior to his feeling abandoned on one hand, and special and chosen on the other:  a rebel who took LSD and went to work barefoot and traveled to India to find spirituality.... he was also abrasive and lacking compassion. He denied his firstborn, born out of wedlock, for many years.

60 Minutes' STEVE KROFT: Explain to me how somebody who was a hippie, a college dropout, somebody who drops LSD and marijuana goes off to India and comes back deciding he wants to be a businessman?

ISAACSON: Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn’t quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak’s board. Wanting to create a business. And I think that’s exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days … And Steve Jobs wasn’t all that eager to be an employee at Hewlett-Packard.

He is also described as the quintessential "Reality Distortion Fielder."  Could that not be because he lived a life of distorted reality as an adoptee??

I found out tonight that it was Jobs who initiated the search for his parents in 1980. He met his mother who introduced him to his full sister and they hit it off. He learned about his father and discovered he had actually met the restaurant owner, but decided he "didn't like what he found about him" and thus chose to never meet him.