With both of their biographies coming out, Joe Paterno can really use a few of the life lessons that Steve Jobs left. The comparisons cannot be more contradictory-the former used to a life of being adored and adulated, the latter an orphan who set out do to things his way.

From the beginning of his life Jobs was rejected by his birth parents, a college couple too young to commit to the rigorous demands of child rearing. Though he was eventually adopted into a family that supported him and let him create and learn at his own pace, the message was very clear to him: he was his own man. Jobs never had anything to lose and it showed in the way he made his own trail. Even as he was booted out of the company that he built, he never lost focus. Jobs asked Walter Isaacson to write a biography of him that was truthful and hid absolutely nothing-the Apple visionary was never afraid of people seeing who he was warts and all because he never feared falling from the pedestal. The bottom of the pedestal was where he started in the first place.

Paterno, on the other hand, has always been the golden boy of Penn State. The face of school spirit, he was synonymous with all things great about the university. A football coach with a library in his name-this was the perfect image for the man they called "Joe Pa," a keen instructor who cared as much about academics as he did sports, the perfect everyman. This afforded Paterno to bend a few of the rules his way; some would even say that this enabled him to look away from what he was really doing in the light of the sexual abuse accusations.

If Paterno, like Jobs, would only learn that thriving on the adoration of others is temporary, he would perhaps rethink the platform he built for himself and be honourable in a way that is unique to anyone who has ever been rejected.

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