<p>His passing made my think about the economy and jobs and college applications. </p>
<p>Do we parents really know what we are talking about to our kids at this time of year?</p>
<p>Jobs created jobs. That’s one thought.</p>
<p>me think</p>
<p>Where did he get all the new ideas? Was he a straight-A, 20 APs, and 2400/36 kid?</p>
<p>No, but we found out on another thread that 2400/4.0 kids always bring more to a college environment than 2200/3.7 kids. Always. Without exception. Therefore, they should always be placed first in line.</p>
<p>I would have a nevous breakdown if my son dropped out of college and lived on the floor of various dormrooms, while walking 7 miles to get a meal from the Hari Krishnas.</p>
<p>But maybe he’s being held back from his full potential in founding a company and ruling the world?</p>
<p>DH is an engineer who was one class short of finishing his undergrad degree. He was the kid who always wanted to work with his hands and his brain, always took apart the toaster, etc. Probably not on Steve Jobs level but nevertheless a very creative thinker who has been a very successful small business owner and largely self taught. What I’ve learned from my twenty five years with him is that he is not your average bear and certainly neither was Jobs. It takes a certain combination of personality and thought process to drop out of college and be successful on your own. From what I have observed a very small percentage of people have those skills. The rest of us, me included, should get those degrees, stay in school and work hard in a more traditional path.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: LOL of the day…please provide link; I"m dying to see who is “involved”…I have a guess…</p>
<p>Before meeting my beloved in laws I didn’t know anyone who hadn’t gone to college. I knew that my mil didn’t finish high school. She finally admitted that fil didn’t finish high school as well.</p>
<p>…he was the president of an entertainment company, rather famous. So, perhaps there are times when parents should allow their children to follow their own path.</p>
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<p>Someone told me that Jobs was a very smart kid even before high school. So, he’s capable of that if he chose to but why waste his time perhaps.</p>
<p>A good guy.</p>
<p>Jobs was also in the right place at the right time with the right partner, Steve Wozniak, who is the person who actually designed the Apple computer.</p>
<p>I’m not saying it was merely a stroke of luck but like Bill Gates and others, timing helped.</p>
<p>[The</a> New Republic: Steve Jobs, Jobs-Creator? : NPR](<a href=“The New Republic: Steve Jobs, Jobs-Creator? : NPR”>The New Republic: Steve Jobs, Jobs-Creator? : NPR)</p>
<p>Story about Apple as job creator and compares its numbers to Ford.</p>
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<p>That surprises me.</p>
<p>But, that’s not to say that Jobs didn’t create jobs, only not domestic jobs. I don’t buy that we have to outsource jobs.</p>
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<p>I bet luck has a lot to do with many things.</p>
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<p>Good timing might be more a compelling argument if the old Apple II were Jobs’s only big success. But he also came up with the Macintosh, Pixar, iMac, IPod, IPhone, IPad, etc.</p>
<p>Luck may have a lot to do with many things, but somehow luck kept following Steve Jobs around.</p>
<p>^^ Like I said, it’s not all luck but it was the success with Apple at the beginning that enabled his company to continue to develop other products, which is something almost every successful manufacturing company needs to do to survive, and it also enabled him to buy, not create, Pixar, since Pixar was created by another imaginative individual - George Lucas.</p>
<p>Speaking of how some of these people got there, and George Lucas, here’s an excerpt from Wiki - </p>
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<p>Not bad for someone who did the CC then transfer route and didn’t attend HYPS and didn’t pursue medicine, law, or engineering.</p>
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Why do you think all the ideas were his? He was the head of a company filled with people whose job it is to come up with ideas. His job was to determine which ideas should move forward and which shouldn’t based on data and business plans provided by other employees.</p>
<p>I don’t know that these other items weren’t ideas originated in Jobs’ mind but I think people are going a little overboard in what they’re attributing to him personally as if he personally originated and designed everything.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to take anything away from him and think he was a very successful person who was at the forefront, along with others, of the personal computer era and he managed to leverage that into additional things including having a company that carried the cell phone to the next level.</p>
<p>To answer the SAT question: I have no idea what Jobs’ SATs were, but I do know that he attended Reed College VERY briefly, then dropped out, then hung around taking a course here, a course there, for a few years.</p>
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<p>Good point. </p>
<p>Does systematic training to put people in a box cut their edges (i.e., ideas) off? Is there anyone out there who doubts that America is a great country even in current economic situations? Just thinking.</p>
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I don’t think the way computer science, engineering, and most other disciplines is taught put people in a box. Speaking about CS/engineering, with which I’m familiar, the training is really more of a basic training and foundation. The people who were trained can then use that foundation to design, develop, and implement things only limited by their imagination and the imagination of others. We see examples of this constantly and everywhere.</p>
<p>How much of a box one is put in while working at a company depends on the company. A lot of technology companies, however, have programs in place to foster and reward creativity and ideas including a rewards program for people who achieve patents and have other creative accomplishments. They have people who are tasked with proactively determining what should be ‘next’. They have other people who can flesh out these new ideas with some practicality via market research and business plans. They’ll have a CEO and other senior management who not only recognize and carry forward these ideas but establish a corporate culture that encourages them and is open enough to not box them in. Some companies do a better job of this than others.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure he came up with any of the technical ideas. What he came up with, over and over, was a vision of how the ideas could and should be applied. And then he went out and made that vision happen.</p>
<p>Take for example the whole idea of a computer operated by a mouse. Jobs didn’t invent that. Apple didn’t invent it. Engineers at Xerox did. They had everything - clicking, highlighting and copying, dragging icons, opening new windows, etc. But for them it was an interesting toy that was going nowhere. Jobs saw it demonstrated at a Xerox lab and went back to Apple and promptly announced he had seen the future, and from now on Apple computers were going to be operated by a mouse. The first big commercial result of that vision was the Macintosh.</p>
<p>A Jobs’ strength was knowing what people would love, insisting it be as perfect as possible, and pushing it to market, again and again, with great timing. It was his combination of talents that made Apple number one in market capitalization.</p>