Abandonment shaped his need for control

Jobs was given up for adoption at birth by his biological mother, a graduate student who insisted the adopting couple be college-educated; when she learned Paul and Clara Jobs hadn't graduated, she nearly blocked the adoption until they promised to fund his education. Jobs knew this story his whole life, and friends traced his fierce need for control — over products, over people, over the narrative of his own life — partly back to it.

He later resisted contact with his biological sister, writer Mona Simpson, before eventually building a relationship with her, and he generally bristled at any suggestion that the Jobses weren't his "real" parents.

The throughline Isaacson draws is that a childhood built on the knowledge of having been chosen, rather than simply born into a family, can produce either fragility or an outsized will to prove you were worth choosing. In Jobs, it produced both.

Takeaway: the wound you don't talk about is often the one running the show.