That’s one of the best parts of my job, actually,” he said. “We thought long and hard about how you tell somebody what you stand for, what your values are, and it occurred to us that if you don’t know somebody very well, you can ask them, ‘Who are your heroes?’ You can learn a lot about someone by knowing who their heroes are.
Jobs was literally dancing, hips swaying in a joyous mambo around the conference table while Schiller and Ive beamed. Yes, he was a showman. But even more than that, he was the ultimate Apple fanboy.
A lot of times, people don’t do great things, because they aren’t really expected of them, and nobody demands they try,” he said. “Nobody says, ‘Hey, that’s the culture here, to do great things.’ If you set that up, people will do things that are greater than they ever thought they could. Being a pirate means going beyond what people thought possible—a small band of people doing some great work that will go down in history.
Fruit, an apple,” he said. “That simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. When you start looking at a problem, it seems really simple—because you don’t understand its complexity. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work. Then you get into the problem and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and sort of come full circle with a beautiful, elegant solution that works. And that’s what we wanted to do with Mac.
Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products. We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are. We try not to bring out another product that’s just different. ‘Different’ and ‘new’ is relatively easy. Doing something that’s genuinely better is very hard.
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Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc.
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Steve Jobs’ had many parts to his genius. Tweaking products until they were really finished was one.
But I would say the most important (and impressive) part of his genius was holistic thinking. He wasn’t a programmer, a hardware engineer, an industrial designer, an advertising copywriter, or an architect, etc. But he deeply understood the essentials of those fields and was able to harness them to create a hugely successful business and set of products.
Another part of his genius was to pick the best talent and get the most out of them.
Best way to judge a candidate
Photo of his collection of programming books.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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Do not therefore consider this life as an object of any moment. Look back on the immense gulf of time already past; and forwards, to that infinite duration yet to come, and you will find how trifling the difference is between a life of three days and of three ages.
Let us then employ properly this moment of time allotted us by fate, and leave the world contentedly; like a ripe olive dropping from its stalk, speaking well of the soil that produced it, and of the tree that bore it.
Mathematics is the only true universal language.
