Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. “I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.”
Father Wound
Absent fathers forged titan ambition through unmet longing.
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During his early years in Florence, Leonardo lived with his father, who arranged for him to get a rudimentary education and would soon help him get a good apprenticeship and commissions. But there is one significant thing that Ser Piero did not do, which would have been easy enough for a well-connected notary: go through the legal process of having his son legitimated. This could be accomplished by the father and child appearing before a local official known as a“count palatine,” usually a dignitary who had been granted power to act on such matters, and presenting a petition as the child knelt. Piero’s decision not to do this for Leonardo is particularly surprising, since he then had no other children of his own.
Perhaps Alan also confronted the figure of his father, whose strength had somehow cancelled itself out, and who had not shown the marathon-runner’s quality of his son. Perhaps too there was a hidden disappointment that his father had never even tried to penetrate his concerns in the way that his mother, however irritatingly, attempted. If Alan’s friends heard him disparage his mother, they usually heard nothing of his father.
Perhaps out of a self-protective instinct, Bill taught his children to be wary of strangers and even of himself. When John was a child, Bill would urge him to leap from his high chair into his waiting arms. One day, he dropped his arms, letting his astonished son crash to the floor. “Remember,” Bill lectured him, “never trust anyone completely, not even me.”
“With a childhood like his in South Africa, I think you have to shut yourself down emotionally in some ways,” says his first wife Justine, the mother of five of his surviving ten children. “If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would’ve opened up an emotional dimension that he didn’t have tools to deal with.” This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”
While he might blame an outburst on the frustration of the moment, Cutler acted according to a script written long ago, when his father stubbornly refused to show pride in his achievements. “What Dave missed as a young man was a dad who could tell him: Dave, you’ve done well. Relax,” said Cutler’s high school football coach, Larry Churches. Neil Cutler endowed his son with a desire to win the respect and admiration of others through competition. “Whatever Dave was doing, he had to prove he did it better than anyone,” Churches said. Even idle pleasures fell prey to Cutler’s need to outdo others. “If you have a father who says you’ve done well, you don’t have to keep proving it, but Dave was always proving it to his dad.”
The first was when a teacher said to him, “John Boyd, you’ll never be anything but a salesman.” Even though John’s father had been a salesman, he took the remark as a biting insult; ... After he married, he told his wife that he heard those terrible words every day of his life, that throughout his career he was driven to prove he was more than a mere salesman.
Chris Holmes made sure to school his daughter not just in the outsized success of its older generations but also in the failings of its younger ones. Both his father and grandfather had lived large but flawed lives, cycling through marriages and struggling with alcoholism. Chris blamed them for squandering the family fortune. “I grew up with those stories about greatness,” Elizabeth would tell The New Yorker in an interview years later, “and about people deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful, and what happens to them when they make that choice—the impact on character and quality of life.”
Regret, that formidable adversary Jeff Bezos worked so hard to outrun, hangs heavily over the life of his biological father.