The Weight of the Wrong Name
It is a strange thing to be thirty and already a ghost in your own house.
In 1985, the air in Cupertino didn’t smell like revolution anymore. It smelled like mahogany boardrooms and the sour sweat of men who were afraid of the very monster they had helped create. Steve Jobs wasn’t just fired; he was surgically removed from his own skin. Apple was his name, his face, his particular way of breathing, and then, on a Tuesday that felt like any other, it simply wasn't his anymore.
When a man is publically gutted like that, the world expects him to either scream or disappear. For a while, Steve did a bit of both. He walked the floors of his house in Woodside, large, mostly empty, a cavernous space that mirrored the hollow in his chest. He would sit in rooms without furniture, staring at the walls, wondering if he had been a fluke. It’s a terrifying thing to realize that the world can move on without you while you’re still standing in the middle of it.
The shame wasn't about the money. He had plenty of that. It was the "publicly out" part. The whispers in the Valley that he was a flash in the pan, a difficult child who had finally burned his fingers. He actually thought about running away. Maybe to Italy. Maybe to the mountains. Somewhere where no one knew what a Macintosh was. But the thing about running away is that you eventually have to stop to catch your breath, and when you do, you’re still there.
So he stayed. He started NeXT. He bought into Pixar.
People talk about these "wilderness years" as if they were a strategic masterstroke, but at the time, they just felt like work. Hard, grinding, often unsuccessful work. NeXT was a beautiful machine that almost no one wanted to buy. Pixar was a bottomless pit of cash for a long time. There is a specific kind of internal reckoning that happens when your second act looks like a slow-motion car crash. He had to learn to listen, not because he suddenly became a saint, but because he was tired of being wrong.
He was becoming a different kind of builder. Less of a tyrant, maybe. Or perhaps just a tyrant who had finally understood that the soul of a thing matters more than the specs. He spent a lot of time in his home office, a space that felt more like a laboratory for a life he was still trying to invent.
On the table where he kept his sketches and his increasingly complicated thoughts, there was often a black Stelton vacuum jug. It was an unassuming thing, cylindrical, matte, almost stubborn in its simplicity. He liked it because it didn't try to be anything other than what it was. It kept the tea hot and the lines clean. (The item mentioned above is linked for readers curious about the exact one he kept in his home.) It was the kind of object that stayed the same while everything else in his life was breaking and reforming.
By the time 1996 rolled around, Apple was dying. It had become a beige, bureaucratic mess. When they bought NeXT and brought Steve back, the press treated it like a homecoming, but inside the building, it felt more like an organ transplant that the body might still reject.
He didn't come back with a grand plan to change the world. He came back to save the only home he’d ever really known. He walked the halls and saw people who had lost their spark, buried under layers of middle management. He started cutting. He stopped projects that didn't make sense. He simplified everything until the only thing left was the truth.
The "iMac" wasn't just a computer; it was a middle finger to the years of beige. It was translucent. It was colorful. It was alive.
There’s a photograph of him from that era, sitting cross-legged on the floor, smiling in a way that looked different than his twenties. There was a lightness to him. He had realized that being fired was the "best thing that could have ever happened" because it stripped away the heavy armor of success. It made him a beginner again. And beginners are allowed to be curious.
I think about that sometimes, how we spend so much energy protecting our reputations, our titles, our "places" in the world. We are so afraid of the fall that we never realize the ground is the only place where things actually grow. Steve had to lose the kingdom to realize he was a gardener, not just a king.
He stayed at the helm until the very end, even when his body began to betray him in ways the boardroom never could. But the work he did in those final years... it was different. It wasn't fueled by the desperation of a young man trying to prove he existed. It was the steady, focused output of a man who knew exactly who he was, because he had already survived being nobody.
The garage wasn't just a place where he started. It was a state of mind he had to lose and find all over again.
Does the idea of "becoming a beginner again" feel like a relief to you, or does it feel like a threat?
If you were stripped of your current title today, what is the one thing about your work that you would still fight to keep?
Category: Career Collapse & Reinvention