As the CEO of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs helped revolutionize the way we communicate with others and the technology we use to do it, but his path to success was rather revolutionary all on its own. Raised in the San Francisco Bay area by adoptive parents, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Ore. in 1972, but his experience as a college student was anything but easy. For starters? The guy was homeless.
“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 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple,” Jobs told the crowd at a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. He dropped out to avoid saddling his parents with debt, but he credits a calligraphy course as the inspiration behind the topography of the first Macintosh computers.
The man who founded Apple, NeXT Computer, and Pixar seemingly regrets nothing about his nomadic early days. In his address, he urged graduates “to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
