What made Steve Jobs tick? Boredom

Washington, Oct 6 (IANS) Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of tech giant Apple, was an adopted child who grew up in a middle-class suburb, took LSD and travelled to India too before he turned to making world-changing products.

His biological parents were Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian immigrant and a graduate student named Joanne Simpson.

Unmarried when her son was born Feb 24, 1955, Simpson gave him up for adoption. She later married Jandali and had another child, award-winning novelist Mona Simpson.

Though he did make a successful effort to find his birth mother, Jobs never seemed to warm to the theory that his drive was a subconscious reaction to a conjectured rejection. He always spoke highly of his adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, who raised him as a single kid in Cupertino, California which would become home to Apple's headquarters.

'I grew up at a time where we were all well-educated in public schools, a time of peace and stability until the Vietnam War got going in the late sixties,' he said.

He went to Reed, a well-regarded liberal arts school known as a hippie haven, but dropped out after a semester, choosing to audit courses informally.

Jobs also took the hallucinatory drug LSD in those years, and would claim that those experiences affected his outlook permanently and positively. After leaving Oregon, he travelled to India.

All of these experiences had an effect on the way he saw the world - and the way he would make products to change that world.

Dropping a clue to what made him tick, Jobs once told a friend, boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and 'out of curiosity comes everything.'

'All the (technology) stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too,' mused the restless visionary.