Why one adoption story shaped a Silicon Valley icon's need for control

When he was six or seven years old, Steve Jobs was sitting on the lawn of his house telling the girl across the street that he was adopted. 'So does that mean your real parents didn't want you?' she asked. 'Lightning bolts went off in my head,' Jobs recalled. He ran into the house crying. His parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, sat him down, looked him in the eye, and said slowly, with emphasis on every word, 'We specifically picked you out.'

Those three ideas, abandoned, chosen, special, fused into something that shaped him for the rest of his life. His mother, Joanne Schieble, had given him up as an infant, insisting only that he go to college graduates; the couple who first agreed to adopt him backed out when he turned out to be a boy, and he ended up with a high school dropout mechanic and a bookkeeper instead. Jobs later dismissed any suggestion that this left scars: 'I have never felt abandoned. I've always felt special. My parents made me feel special.'

Others who knew him were not so sure. Del Yocam, a longtime colleague, believed his need for total control over everything he made traced straight back to being given up at birth. Greg Calhoun thought the pain of it made him fiercely independent. Andy Hertzfeld went further, tracing what he called Jobs's reflexive cruelty toward people directly to that early wound. Chrisann Brennan, the mother of Jobs's first daughter, put it most starkly: being adopted left him 'full of broken glass,' she said, and 'he who is abandoned is an abandoner.'

There is a strange echo here that Jobs himself noticed only later. When Chrisann Brennan told him she was pregnant, they were both twenty-three years old, the exact age his own biological parents had been when they gave him up. He denied paternity for a year, demanded a DNA test, and only slowly, imperfectly, came around to supporting his daughter Lisa. 'When I did find out that he was twenty-three when he got Joanne pregnant with me,' Jobs later admitted, 'I thought, whoa!'

Whichever explanation you find most convincing, the story shows something worth sitting with: a single sentence, delivered with enough conviction at the right age, can become the load-bearing wall of someone's entire identity, for good and for ill.

Start by putting into words the early story you built your identity around, the sentence or moment that decided how special, safe, or worthy you felt, the way Jobs carried 'we specifically picked you out' his whole life. Then look honestly at whether you use that story to explain your behavior toward other people instead of just excusing it. Find one person who will tell you plainly when that old story is steering you somewhere unhelpful, the way a colleague could close Jobs's office door and simply ask him to stop. Finally, watch for the moment when you might be about to hand someone else the very experience that once wounded you, because that is the moment the pattern is easiest to break.