I, Steve - Steve Jobs In His Own Words

by George Beahm

Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: we do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we’re really good at packaging that all together into a product. We’re the only people left in the computer industry that do that. — STEVE JOBS

THINK DIFFERENT Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

All we are is our ideas, or people. That’s what keeps us going to work in the morning, to hang around these great bright people. I’ve always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.

BEING THE BEST We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best.

It’s not just recruiting. After recruiting, it’s building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision — all those things.

BROAD LIFE EXPERIENCES A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. — Wired, February 1996.

After Apple management complained about the six Apple employees SJ was taking with him to start Next: I wasn’t aware that Apple owned me, you know. I don’t think they do. I think that I own me. And for me not to be able to practice my craft ever again in my life seems odd.

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

It was one of the first times I started thinking that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and [Hindu guru] Neem Karolie Baba put together. — STEVE JOBS: THE BRILLIANT MIND BEHIND APPLE, 2009.

CREDO It’s not done until it ships.

The journey is the reward. — FOLKLORE.ORG, JANUARY 1983.

Real artists ship. — FOLKLORE.ORG, JANUARY 1984.

On Bill Gates and Microsoft: Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful — that’s what matters to me.

design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

EXCELLENCE People judge you by your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. — STEVE JOBS:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1000 things.

Sure, what we do has to make commercial sense, but it’s never the starting point. We start with the product and the user experience.

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

’ I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. — PLAYBOY,

INNOVATION A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.

Apple’s the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing. It turns out that they, in my opinion, are Apple’s greatest strategic advantage. We didn’t have a plan, so it looked like this was a tremendous deficit. But with a plan, it’s Apple’s core strategic advantage, if you believe that there’s still room for innovation in this industry, which I do, because Apple can innovate faster than anyone else.

iPhone is five years ahead of what everybody else has got. If we didn’t do one more thing we’d be set for five years!

LOSING MARKET SHARE And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever … So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy.

You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the goliath, IBM, and saying ‘Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It’s called Macintosh and it is so much better’.

MAKING BOLD ANNOUNCEMENTS I understand the appeal of a slow burn, but personally I’m a big-bang guy.

What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built.

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organisation and keep it at bay

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.

[Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center] didn’t have it totally right, but they had the germ of the idea of all three things. And the three things were: graphical user interfaces, object-oriented computing, and networking.

We don’t think one company can do everything. So you’ve got to partner with people that are really good at stuff … We’re not trying to be great at search, so we partner with people who are great at search … We know how to do the best map clients in the world, but we don’t know how to do the back end, so we partner with people that know how to do the back end. And what we want to do is be that consumer’s device and that consumer’s experience wrapped around all this information and things we can deliver to them in a wonderful user interface, in a coherent product.

You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do … Don’t settle.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance … Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about; otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing]? There’s a great quote by Henry Ford who said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse”’.

We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.

[Technology] doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t. Technologies can make it easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in a radical new light, that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

a lot of our employees have forgotten what Apple stands for. And so we needed a way to communicate what the heck Apple’s all about. And we thought, how do you tell somebody what you are, who you are, what you care about? And the best way we could think of was, you know, if you know who somebody’s heroes are, that tells you a lot about them. So we thought we’re going to tell people who our heroes are, and that’s what the ‘Think Different’ campaign is about. It’s about telling people who we admire, who we think are the heroes of this century. And — some people will like us, and some people won’t like us.

it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

[H]ave the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me, too’ products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. A reference to a popular saying by Zen master Shunryu Suzuki: ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’