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Make Something Wonderful is a personal collection of Steve Jobs’s emails, writing, speeches, and interviews from throughout his life. The work offers a behind-the-scenes look into his thoughts on creativity, technology, and business.
The Notes
- “Some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.”
- “Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore.”
- His 4th-grade teacher reignited his desire to learn by bribing him with candy and money to do the work.
- Jobs dropped out of Reed College after 6 months. Didn’t want his parents to spend their life savings on college. But he stayed at the campus, sitting in on classes and learning, for over a year.
- His first job in the industry was at Atari, worked there for less than a year. Work took him to Europe, where he took a leave of absence to spend time in India.
- “The kids growing up now are definitely products of the computer generation, and in their lifetimes the computer will become the predominant medium of communication, just as the television took over from the radio, took over from even the book.” — 1983.
- “When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was the books. I could go and read what Aristotle or Plato wrote without an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle. The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.” — 1983
- “I don’t think my taste in aesthetics is that much different than a lot of other people’s. The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be. That’s the only difference.”
- “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”
- “Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. The most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things that everyone and everything tries to convince you to strive for.”
- “Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.”
- “Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for and practicing of your working life. There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can’t be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one’s life.”
- “I’ve always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I’ve always pushed for things that pulled technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields.”
- “My weaknesses are that I’m too idealistic. [I need to] realize that sometimes best is the enemy of better. Sometimes I go for “best” when I should go for “better,” and end up going nowhere or backwards. I’m not always wise enough to know when to go for the best and when to just go for better. Sometimes I’m blinded by “what could be” versus “what is possible,” doing things incrementally versus doing them in one fell swoop. Balancing the ideal and the practical is something I still must pay attention to.”
- Jobs often emailed notes to himself.
- “There’s a human drama to most everything. You look at it sometimes, and it seems dry as history. But if you peel the onion, there’s humanity underneath.”
- “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
- “Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my favorites, where he talked about, in a certain sense, “We build the products that we want to use ourselves.” And so he’s really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance that has had a huge impact on the industry. And his ability to always come around and figure out where that next bet should be has been phenomenal. Apple literally was failing when Steve went back and reinfused the innovation and risk-taking that have been phenomenal.” — Bill Gates
- “I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or a Beatles song…”
- Apple
- Jobs and Wozniak built the Apple I in Jobs’s parents’ garage in 1976. They couldn’t afford to buy a computer so they scrounged parts and built one themselves.
- They started building them for friends. To cut down the build time, they paid someone to make a printed circuit board, which allowed them to plug in parts. The goal was to sell raw circuit boards.
- A local computer store in Mountain View ordered 50 computers, fully assembled.
- “We went and bought the parts to build one hundred computers. We built fifty of them and delivered them. We got paid in cash and ran back and paid the people that sold us parts. Then we had the classic Marxian profit realization crisis, which was our profit wasn’t liquid—it was in fifty computers sitting on the floor. We decided we had to start learning about sales and distribution so that we could sell the fifty computers and get back our money. That’s how we got in the business. We took our idea [for the computer] to a few companies, one where Woz worked [Hewlett-Packard] and one where I worked at the time [Atari]. Neither one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our own company.”
- Apple was incorporated in 1977.
- IPOs in 1980.
- Wozniak left Apple in 1981.
- “Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.” — 1983
- Jobs made several references in the ’80s about shrinking the computing power down into a small enough package that it could be easily carried around.
- “We’re trying to get away from programming. We’ve got to get away from programming because people don’t want to program computers. People want to use computers.”
- “We started with nothing. So whenever you start with nothing, you can always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is—when you sort of get something, it’s very easy to go into cover-your-ass mode, and then you become conservative and vote for Ronnie. So what we’re trying to do is to realize the very amazing time that we’re in and not go into that mode.” — 1983
- John Scully became Apple’s CEO in 1983. — “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
- On Macintosh: “It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. But the neatest thing about it to me is, the same as the telephone to the telegraph, Macintosh lets you sing. It lets you use special fonts. It lets you make drawings and pictures or incorporate other people’s drawings or pictures into your documents.”
- The Macintosh debuted in 1984 with a Superbowl Ad produced by Ridley Scott.
- Jobs “resigned” from Apple in September 1985 after a power struggle with then-CEO John Scully. He later admitted that the board fired him.
- Apple struggled to maintain the innovative culture and direction under Scully. Scully resigned in 1993. Two more CEOs followed over the next three years and the company suffers for it.
- “The problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating. If you look at the Mac that ships today, it’s 25 percent different than the day I left, and that’s not enough for ten years and billions of dollars in R&D. It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac. It’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for ten years. That’s Apple’s problem, is that their differentiation evaporated.” — 1996
- “Apple has to be 50 percent or 100 percent better, because when you buy something that is out of the mainstream a little bit, you take a risk, and you want a much bigger reward for taking that risk… That’s why cost-cutting and other things at Apple are not going to be the cure. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. There’s a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with the proper leadership, which is what’s been missing.”
- Apple lost $800 million in 1996.
- Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 as the interim CEO. That year:
- All but 2 board members resigned.
- The company’s product strategy and roadmap was streamlined.
- Product offerings were slashed from 17 to 4 and they focused on two market segments: education and creative content.
- Distribution/inventory channels were overhauled.
- A new ad agency was hired.
- Apple signed a partnership deal with Microsoft (Microsoft bailed out Apple).
- Existing employee stock options were repriced to $13.25. The board approved additional options on 6 million shares at $19.75 for a total of over 20 million shares or 16% of Apple’s outstanding shares.
- A new severance plan was instituted for all employees.
- The sabbatical program was put on hold for 1 year.
- Employees and customers did not like the changes.
- Jobs wanted a hard reset on Apple’s culture.
- The “Think Different” ad campaign was introduced in September 1997:
- “The question we asked was, “Our customers want to know: Who is Apple, and what is it that we stand for? Where do we fit in this world?” And what we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody, in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple, at the core—its core value—is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe… And that those people that are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do.”
- “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.”
- Hierarchy of Skepticism
- Jobs noticed that the reasons for skepticism around Apple’s renewed success changed with each successive win. (borrowed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).
- 1st Level = Apple was in a death spiral and unlikely to survive.
- 2nd Level = No stable business in the Mac market.
- 3rd Level = No product strategy/roadmap.
- 4th Level = Where’s the growth?
- The iMac was the best-selling computer for the month of November 1998.
- 1998 was Apple’s first profitable year since 1995.
- “Today is a good day to remember Apple’s legacy, which is to bridge the gap between sophisticated technology and “the rest of us” who make up most of humanity. It’s our job to make complex technology easy to use and fun to use.”
- The first Apple Store opened in 2001 with the Genius Bar.
- OS X was unveiled in 2001, based on the NeXT operating system.
- The iPod was introduced in 2001.
- The iPhone was introduced in 2007.
- The iPad was introduced in 2010.
- Jobs resigned from Apple in August 2011, six weeks before his death.
- NeXT
- Started in 1985 as an attempt to build the next great computer company. He brought a handful of Mac employees with him, which led to a lawsuit between Apple and NeXT.
- The first computer debuted in 1988. It bombed.
- He shifted focus to software, cut costs, and closed its factory.
- Apple was looking to buy a company for its operations system. An engineer at NeXT approached Apple, behind Jobs’s back, about buying NeXT.
- Apple bought NeXT in December 1996 for its operating system software for $427 million.
- Pixar
- Jobs initially invested $10 million, in 1986, in the computer graphics operation spun off from George Lucas’s company, making Jobs the majority owner. His entire investment came to $60 million.
- Its first product was a graphics computer priced at $100,000.
- Pixar used short films to promote its product line.
- Won an Oscar for Best Animated Short for Tin Toy in 1989.
- The hardware business was eventually scrapped to focus on computer-animated films.
- Signed a deal with Disney to create 3 feature films. Pixar was financially desperate. The deal was heavily weighted in Disney’s favor — Disney owned the films, characters, most of the profits, and did not allow Pixar to pitch rejected film ideas to other studios.
- Toy Story premiered in 1995. It was a massive success.
- IPOs in 1995.
- Pixar would go on to produce blockbusters: A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and Toy Story 3.
- “Our strategy in the early days of Pixar was: find a way to pay the bills… We were trying to pay the bills and just buy time. That strategy really turned out not to work. Probably if you look back in the rearview mirror, we would have been better off just funding the animation efforts and not trying to pay the bills through these other products, such as the Pixar Image Computer and software, but that was our best attempt to try to keep the company going. In the end, I just ended up writing checks to keep the company going — and that basically went on for ten years.”
- “One of the things that we encountered was that the Hollywood culture and the Silicon Valley culture each use different models of employee retention. Hollywood uses the stick, which is the contract. And Silicon Valley uses the carrot, which is the stock option… And we prefer the Silicon Valley model in this case: give people stock in the company so that we all have the same goal, which is to create shareholder value. But [not having contracts] also makes us constantly worry about making Pixar the greatest company we can, so that nobody would ever want to leave.”
- “Walt Disney realized many decades ago that animation was so expensive that you couldn’t afford to animate ten times more than what you need. Matter of fact, you don’t want to animate even 10 percent more than what you need. And therefore, the only conclusion you can come to is, you have to edit your film before you make it. Disney pioneered a lot of techniques for doing that, and they’ve refined those over the last sixty years. Working with Disney gave us access to that wisdom that you can’t buy for love or money.”
- Pixar’s new headquarters opened in 2000 and cost $100 million, paid for by the profits from A Bugs Life. It was designed so employees would meet, interact, collaborate, and spark creative ideas.
- “Pixar is a company that has one new product a year, at best. That’s the holy grail for us: to have a movie a year… As CEO, you make a few important decisions a quarter—maybe three—but they are very hard to change if you decide you want to change them.”
- Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock in 2006.
- On Mistakes/Failing
- “Things get more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy — and rarely does it take more money — to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time.”
- “You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times.”
- “One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn’t work out, a lot of times, people’s reaction is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on their face again. I think that’s a big mistake, because you never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there. I’ve tried to not be afraid to fail, and, matter of fact, I’ve failed quite a bit since leaving Apple.”
- “Character is built not in good times, but in bad times; not in a time of plenty, but in a time of adversity.”
- On the Internet (1996)
- “I think most large companies and medium-size companies (and even small companies) are starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution chain, bypassing all middlemen, going directly from the supplier to the consumer. That’s a pretty powerful concept when you think about it.”
- “It’s going to be this very leveling phenomenon, but I think a tremendous amount of goods and services is going to be sold, or at least the demand created for such things, over the web.”
- “It’s not just shopping for goods and services. It’s shopping for information.”
- On Management
- The CEO’s job is to:
- Recruit.
- Set the direction of the company.
- Inspire, cajole, persuade.
- “There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I’m not smart enough to have ever found any.”
- “I spend 20 percent of my time recruiting, even now. I spend a day a week helping people recruit. It’s one of the most important things you can do.”
- “Ultimately, it’s the work that motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it’s not. It’s the work. My job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best. But it’s ultimately the work that motivates people. That’s what binds them together.”
- “Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do.”
- “If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you. You know things that they don’t know, and they know things that you don’t know, and it all works.”
- “The most important lesson I ever learned was that you have to hire people better than you are… In normal life, the difference in dynamic range from average to best is usually 30, 40, 50 percent. Twice as good: rarely… But I saw that Woz—one guy—having meetings in his head could run circles around two hundred engineers at Hewlett-Packard. That’s what I saw. And I thought, “Wow.” And I didn’t really understand it at first. Then I started to understand it. It took me about ten years to actually try to put it into practice. Because you’d try to hire and find those people. And they’re really hard to find.”
- “Nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. It’s true. It’s a lot of work, and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager—and ruin the group you care about.”
- “A really smart guy I met a long time ago who used to teach at Disney University—Walt Disney recruited him to run Disney University, actually—he told me about his point of view, which I’ve remembered to this day. He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.”
- “Apple’s goals used to be to make the best personal computers in the world. And then the second goal was to make a profit so we could keep on doing number one. Right? What happened was that, for a time, those got reversed: “We want to make a bunch of money, and so, OK, to do that, we’re going to have to make some good personal computers.” But it didn’t work. It never works. And so things start to fall apart. Those subtle changes in values can mean everything. The higher up in the organization they are, the more pervasive influence they have. So if you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time, that everybody agrees on—and not codify how you’re going to get there… And that’s one of my mantras around Apple and Pixar: that recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people—that’s half the battle.”
- The CEO’s job is to:
- On Marketing
- “To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world, and we’re not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”
- “One of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember: Nike sells a commodity! They sell shoes! And yet when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the products. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles, and why they are better than Reebok’s air soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are. That’s what they are about.”
- “Brands take decades to build.”
- Stanford Commencement Speech
- “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. 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.”
- “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.”
- “Sometime life’s gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. 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. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
- “Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new… 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. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
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