Reprising this opening to my essay “How Can We Make Entrepreneurs?”:
“As a kid, Steve Jobs hated school. Many of us can relate, even if we are not brilliant business innovators. School bored the young Jobs painfully, and he reacted by engaging in acts of disobedience and defiance. ‘I was pretty bored in school,’ he remembers, ‘and I turned into a little terror.’ As a result, he was expelled from the third grade. Later, he loathed his junior high school, and one day he simply refused to go back. So adamant was the adolescent Jobs that his parents moved to another California town in hopes of finding a better fit.
“The adult Jobs became one of the outstanding entrepreneurs of his generation. But his school experiences raise a question: Did Steve Jobs fail to adapt himself to the system, or did the school system fail to fit Steve Jobs?“
The essay’s theme is entrepreneurial education, and it was published in Shawn Klein’s edited volume Steve Jobs and Philosophy (Open Court, 2015), pp. 53-66. The whole volume is worth checking out.
Related: A podcast version of the essay: “Why Steve Jobs Hated School.”
The rest of us were too busy doing what was expected and left the opportunity to others. I think he was too bright and too driven to fit the expected path. Not that unusual, if you think about other extremely successful people. I dabbled, at the time, with the new z-80 chip, but got too busy to follow up. If you think about it, the system did work for Jobs- we left the opportunity open for him. Fear of failure stops most of us.
Ouch!
Your point about fear of failure is an especially interesting one, Doug. Courage and character development then become important themes in the education of young people. Working on that topic.