By Adekunle Adekoya

LAST week, Steven Paul Jobs, one of the men who helped digitalize the world, in a sense, passed on at the age of 56. He was a man, who, from nowhere and hanging on to his wits worked and clawed his way to the very top, and by the time he breathed his last, he was, according to Forbes, worth US$7 billion, making him the 42nd wealthiest American.

Apple Computer was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, and by the time Jobs breathed his last, Apple had become one of the largest companies in the world and the most valuable technology company in the world (by market capitalization), having surpassed Microsoft.

As of September 2010, Apple had 46,600 full time employees and 2,800 temporary full time employees worldwide and had worldwide annual sales of $65.23 billion.

Jobs’ sired by Syrian

As readers of this column might have gleaned elsewhere, this technology colossus was sired by a Syrian professor of political science, Abdulfattah Jandali. His mother, Joanne Simpson, was a therapist, and shortly after he was born, he was given up for adoption, unnamed. It was his adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs that named him Steven.

What remains inscrutable however was why his parents did not want him, and did not even name him, but went ahead after giving him up for adoption to marry and even have another child, a girl named Mona. Jobs later was able to uncover information about his biological parents at the age of 27.

The tumultuous tapestry of Jobs’life continued to be woven in the looms of destiny, for, after high school in 1972, he enrolled at Reed College, Oregon, but dropped out after only one semester in pursuit of a dream that would take him to the very top of the sector he chose to operate in.

Blue-chip, five star dropouts

In dropping out of school, he was only fulfilling a destiny seemingly shared by some of America’s tech leviathans. Recall that Bill Gates of Microsoft was at Harvard studying mathematics and law, after which he took a leave of absence to pursue his dream.

He never returned to Harvard, but instead worked and grew to become the best known-name in the software world, and amassed a fortune that has kept him in the top tier of the world’s rich list for years now. As at now, Bill Gates is world’s second richest man with a net worth of $56 billion, but financial experts say his second position is because of his love for philanthropy which cost a lot.

Similarly, Michael Saul Dell, of Dell Computers. Here was a pre-med student at Austin who abandoned his studies to sell PCs, at age 19, and about a decade later, had become the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

The lessons

Herein are some of the lessons to be learnt from the life and times of Steven Paul Jobs. A child whose parents did not want became the brightest star that family could ever have produced, and if not for Steve Jobs’ worldwide popularity as tech wizard, nobody would also know anything about a Syrian political scientist called Jandali. More than that, not all droputs are ne’er-do-wells, as Jobs, Bill Gates and Dell have shown. To today’s youths however, be sure you know what you are dropping out for; never lose sight of the dream until it is achieved.