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Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”
The mark of perfection
you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”
Why you should go to work or start a business.
It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
“I got a feeling for the empowering aspect of naïveté,” Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.”
The aspect of naïveté
Like his father, he could be flinty when bargaining with suppliers, but he didn’t allow a craving for profits to take precedence over his passion for building great products.
Money can ruin your life.
