Whatever his faults, Jobs could never be accused of being backward in coming forward. He was a man who threw himself into life, putting himself in the way of experiences that he could then mine for his work. He spoke often of the importance of exposing yourself to the best things that humans have done so you can bring that experience into whatever it is you do. Indeed, he argued that the team responsible for the Mac were not tunnel-visioned über-geeks; instead, they were a gang of exceptionally broad characters – musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians – who, it just so happened, were also the best computer scientists in the world.

As for the über-geeks, of which there is no shortage in Silicon Valley, Jobs was vocal in his criticism of their lack of experience. Part of his life’s philosophy was based around the idea that experiences are like dots that we connect to navigate our path through life. If you don’t have enough dots, he believed, you end up with a pretty straight line. And Jobs was not interested in a straight-line approach to anything. For him, going on an interesting journey was key to finding your way to the best endpoint. When it came to who he wanted working with him at Apple, he looked for people with broad life experience that they could translate into a better understanding of people. He considered this crucial for devising solutions to the problems – technological or not – that real people face.

His faith in the value of personal experience informed his own life deeply. As a tenth-grader with his eye on a future in Silicon Valley, Jobs got himself part-time work in an electronics parts store. Not only did it give him an income stream but it also exposed him to the nuts and bolts of the business he had set his heart on. Beyond that, it gave him a solid grounding in the rudimentaries of business, and the importance of the bottom line. Before long he was buying electronics parts himself from a third-party supplier and selling them on to his own boss at a small profit, before helping his boss move them on to their customer base at still greater profit.

The period after he dropped out of Reed could easily have become one of lost opportunities, but not for Jobs. He mined his time there in most unexpected ways. Although he had formally left his course, he continued to attend several classes that piqued his interest. One of these was a calligraphy class. At the time, Jobs had been struck by the fact that some posters around college were far more eye-catching than others, and he became interested in the power of different fonts. When he took the calligraphy class, he did not have much of an eye on how it might inform his future but he would take the knowledge he picked up there and use it to brilliant effect years later in the design of the Apple Mac’s software. The Mac would open up a galaxy of fonts to people who probably never knew such things could ever be of interest to them. The era of desktop publishing that the Mac helped usher in owed no little debt to that dot of calligraphy experience that Jobs picked up in a classroom in Oregon in the early 1970s.