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Friday, October 7, 2011

Steve Jobs: boredom & his 4th grade teacher

The importance of boredom and a fourth grade teacher on the life of Steve Jobs:

Jobs usually had little interest in public self-analysis, but every so often he’d drop a clue to what made him tick. Once he recalled for me some of the long summers of his youth. I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me (J. Cayeiro). Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”

In an interview with a Smithsonian oral history project in 1995, Jobs talked about how he learned to read before he got to school — that and chasing butterflies was his passion. School was a shock to him — “I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it,” he said. By his own account he became a troublemaker. Only the ministrations of a wise fourth grade teacher — who lured him back to learning with bribes and then hooked him with fascinating projects — rekindled his love of learning.



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