The unformed youth at the Garden of Allah could never have revived the moribund company he returned to in 1997, nor could he have engineered the slow and deeply complicated corporate evolution that led to the unimaginable success Apple enjoyed during the last decade of his life. His own personal growth was equally complicated. I can’t think of a businessman who grew and changed and matured more than Steve. Personal change is, of course, incremental. As all “grown-ups” come to understand, we wrestle with and learn how to manage our gifts and flaws over a lifetime. It’s an endless growth process. And yet it’s not as if we become wholly different people. Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths. His negative qualities didn’t go away, nor were they replaced by new good traits. But he learned how to manage himself, his own personal miasma of talents and rough edges. Most of them, anyway. To understand how that happened, and how that led to the confounding resurgence of Apple later in his career, you have to consider the full range of personal contradictions Steve brought to the Garden of Allah that December afternoon.

STEVEN PAUL JOBS felt deeply entitled almost from the start, thanks to parents who raised him to think that he was every bit as special as they believed he could be. Born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, Steve was given up for adoption by his birth mother, Joanna Schieble, who as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison had become romantically involved in 1954 with Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian PhD candidate studying political science. Schieble moved to San Francisco after becoming pregnant, but Jandali remained in Wisconsin. Paul and Clara Jobs, a childless working-class couple, adopted Steve just a few days after his birth. When Steve was five years old they moved to Mountain View, twenty-five miles south of the city, and soon thereafter adopted a daughter they named Patty. While some have trotted out Steve’s adoption as a primal “rejection” that explains the irascible behavior he often displayed, especially early in his career, Steve repeatedly told me that he had been loved and deeply indulged by Paul and Clara. “He felt he had been really blessed by having the two of them as parents,” says Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve’s widow.

Neither Paul nor Clara had attended college, but they did promise Schieble that they would send their new son. It was a significant pledge for a lower-middle-class family, and it marked the beginning of their pattern of giving their only son whatever he needed. Steve was whip smart; he skipped sixth grade, and his teachers even considered having him skip two grades. After leapfrogging to seventh grade, however, Steve felt snubbed socially and still unchallenged by his schoolwork. He pleaded with his parents to move him into a better school, and they agreed, despite the considerable cost of the switch. Paul and Clara packed up and relocated to Los Altos, a prosperous bedroom community that had sprung up in what were once plum orchards adjoining the low hills rising to the west above San Francisco Bay. The new neighborhood was then a subdivision within the Cupertino-Sunnyvale school district, one of the best in California. Once there, Steve started to flourish.

Paul and Clara may have let his sense of entitlement blossom, but they also nurtured his perfectionism, especially when it came to the rigor that underlies great craftsmanship. Paul Jobs held many jobs over his lifetime, including repo man, machinist, and car mechanic. He was at heart an inveterate tinkerer and craftsman who made furniture or rebuilt cars most weekends and taught his son the paramount value of taking one’s time, paying attention to details, and—since Paul was anything but rich—putting in the legwork to hunt for spare parts that were a good value. “He had a workbench out in his garage,” Steve once told an interviewer from the Smithsonian Institution. “When I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said ‘Steve, this is your workbench now.’ And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me … teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.” In his later years, as Steve would show me a new iPod or a new laptop, he would remember how his father told him that you had to devote as much care to the underside of a cabinet as to the finish, or to the brake pads of a Chevy Impala as to the paint job. Steve had a deeply sentimental streak, and it came out when he told these stories about his father. They were made more poignant by the fact that Steve gave his father so much credit for instilling his own sense of aesthetic excellence in a medium—digital electronics—that Paul Jobs would never fully understand.

That combination, of believing that he was special and of wanting to get things just right, was a potent mix given where and when he was raised. The experience of growing up in what wasn’t yet even called Silicon Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s was unique. The environs between Palo Alto and San Jose were a boomtown of a new kind, attracting highly educated electrical engineers, chemists, optical specialists, computer programmers, and physicists who were drawn to the region’s blossoming semiconductor, telecommunications, and electronics companies. It was a time when the market for high-end electronics had shifted from government and military customers to corporate and industrial America, expanding dramatically the number of potential customers for new electronic technologies of all kinds. The fathers of many other kids in Steve’s neighborhood were engineers who commuted to work at the nearby headquarters of emerging tech giants like Lockheed, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Applied Materials.

Living there, a curious child interested in math and science could easily develop a much deeper sense of the leading edge of technology than those growing up elsewhere in the country. Electronics were just beginning to replace hot rods as the passion of young tinkerers. Geeks lived and breathed the fumes emanating from their soldering irons, and traded dog-eared copies of Popular Science and Popular Electronics magazines. They built their own transistor radios, hi-fi stereo systems, ham radios, oscilloscopes, rockets, lasers, and Tesla coils from kits offered by mail order companies like Edmund Scientific, Heathkit, Estes Industries, and Radio Shack. In Silicon Valley, electronics wasn’t just a hobby. It was a fast-growing new industry and just as exciting as rock and roll.

For precocious kids like Steve, the implicit promise in all this was that anything could be figured out—and since anything could be figured out, anything could be built. “It gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe,” he once told me. “These things were not mysteries anymore. You looked at a television set and you would think that, ‘I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build that.’ Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment and that one had no knowledge of their interiors.”

He joined the Explorers Club, a group of fifteen kids who met regularly on Hewlett-Packard’s campus in Palo Alto to work on electronics projects and get lessons from HP engineers. This is where Steve was first exposed to computers. It’s also what gave him the outlandish notion to reach out and establish a minor, but fascinating, connection with one of the two men who famously created HP, the first Silicon Valley dynamo out of a garage. When he was fourteen years old, he called up Bill Hewlett at his Palo Alto home to ask personally for some hard-to-find electronic components for an Explorers Club project. He got them, in part, because he already could spin a good tale. In many ways, Steve was a prototypical adolescent geek. But he also was a curious student of the humanities, beguiled by the words of Shakespeare, Melville, and Bob Dylan. Glib and persuasive with his parents, he applied the same skills when dealing with friends, teachers, mentors, and eventually the rich and powerful; Steve innately understood from an early age that the right words and stories could help him win the attention he needed to get what he wanted.