You'll get more value from this book than a year of business school. Seriously. I've distilled 30+ hours of reading into the best stories, insights, and habits you can steal from the life of Steve Jobs. (You're welcome!)
[Excerpts from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson]
It was important, his father said, to craft the back of the 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.”
He learned to stare at people without blinking, and he perfected long silences punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking.
“The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme.” Jobs honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. “One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their f***ing eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes.”
“It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
“Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”
“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.”
He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you.
“A game like this might take most engineers a few months,” Wozniak recalled. “I thought that there was no way I could do it, but Steve made me sure that I could.” So he stayed up four nights in a row and did it.
Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.
He emphasized that 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.
“When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product.”
This was usually accomplished by Jobs’s preferred mode of meeting, which was taking a walk together.
When [Atkinson] was asked to come work for Apple, he declined. But then Apple sent him a nonrefundable plane ticket, and he decided to use it and let Jobs try to persuade him. “We are inventing the future,” Jobs told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. “Think about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here and make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson did.
Two great maxims Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”
“Everything you’ve ever done in your life is sh*t,” Jobs said, “so why don’t you come work for me?” Belleville did, and so did Larry Tesler.
Steve wasn’t much of an engineer himself, but he was very good at assessing people’s answers. He could tell whether the engineers were defensive or unsure of themselves.
Atkinson pushed himself to make this trick work because he thought he had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox PARC. In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so. “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.”
Jobs’s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be a part of his merry band of pirates was making sure they had a passion for the product. He would sometimes bring candidates into a room where a prototype of the Mac was covered by a cloth, dramatically unveil it, and watch. “If their eyes lit up, if they went straight for the mouse and started pointing and clicking, Steve would smile and hire them,” recalled Andrea Cunningham. “He wanted them to say ‘Wow!’”
“Steve was so passionate about building this amazing device that would change the world,” Horn recalled. “By sheer force of his personality, he changed my mind.” Jobs showed Horn exactly how the plastic would be molded and would fit together at perfect angles, and how good the board was going to look inside. “He wanted me to see that this whole thing was going to happen and it was thought out from end to end. Wow, I said, I don’t see that kind of passion every day. So I signed up.”
Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one.
“If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes save per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”
“Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”
“The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.”
“Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes,” he told Atkinson. He also admired the design of the Mercedes.
“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.”
He got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson.
Apple took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.”
He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality.
He went so far as to design special tools so that the Macintosh case could not be opened with a regular screwdriver. “We’re going to design this thing so nobody but Apple employees can get inside this box.”
He had learned from his public relations consultant Regis McKenna how to dole out exclusive interviews in a dramatic manner. Reporters from the anointed publications were ushered in sequentially for their hour with him in his Carlyle Hotel suite, where a Lisa computer was set on a table and surrounded by cut flowers.
After tearing people down, he would find ways to build them up and make them feel that being part of the Macintosh project was an amazing mission. Every six months he would take most of his team on a two-day retreat at a nearby resort.
After mentioning a scheduled completion date, he told them, “It would be better to miss than to ship out the wrong thing.” He displayed another maxim: “It’s not done until it ships.”
Another chart contained a kōan-like phrase that he later told me was his favorite maxim: “The journey is the reward.”
Someone asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”
“As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe.”
Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. “He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other than to acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person.”
Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to accomplish things so quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history.
“You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make much of a difference. You might as well get it over with. I’m going to ship the code a week from Monday, with your names on it.”
Jobs was more intuitive and romantic [than Gates] and had a greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, and interfaces friendly. He had a passion for perfection, which made him fiercely demanding.
As soon as the policeman left, Jobs got back on the road and accelerated to 100. “He absolutely believed that the normal rules didn’t apply to him.”
“There’s an old hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make up your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’”
“Sculley believed in keeping people happy and worrying about relationships. Steve didn’t care about that. But he did care about the product in a way that Sculley never could, and he was able to avoid having too many bozos working at Apple by insulting anyone who wasn’t an A player.”
When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.” Jobs admired that kind of thinking.
As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.
“If you ever need an investor, call me.” Jobs did indeed need one, badly. But he was careful not to show it. He waited a week before calling back.
IBM sent to Palo Alto a 125-page contract. Jobs tossed it down without reading it. “You don’t get it,” he said as he walked out of the room. He demanded a simpler contract of only a few pages, which he got within a week.
Jobs perfected the art of turning product launches into theatrical productions. No detail was too small. Jobs went over the invitation list and even the lunch menu.
One of Jobs’s management philosophies was that it is crucial, every now and then, to roll the dice and “bet the company” on some new idea or technology.
When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.” As would become standard practice, Jobs offered to provide “exclusive” interviews to anointed publications in return for their promising to put the story on the front cover.
The plan was to gather everyone in a room with Jobs, and the CFO would come in a few minutes late to establish that he was the person running the meeting. “But a funny thing happened,” Catmull recalled. “Steve started the meeting on time without the CFO, and by the time the CFO walked in Steve was already in control of the meeting.”
“My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined.”
“There’s no yacht in my future,” he said. “I’ve never done this for the money.”
“Steve didn’t seem to have a clear answer,” Amelio later said. “He seemed to have a set of one-liners.” Amelio felt he was witnessing Jobs’s reality distortion field and was proud to be immune to it.
He was particularly adroit at feigning modesty. “It’s probably a totally crazy idea,” he said, but if they found it appealing, “I’ll structure any kind of deal you want—license the software, sell you the company, whatever.”
“He made me feel like a lifelong friend,” Amelio recalled. Jobs indeed had a way of doing that.
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs said.
“Our goal is not just to make money but to make great products,” Ive recalled. “The decisions you make based on that philosophy are fundamentally different.”
You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of parts that are not essential.
He often began negotiations by proclaiming that the other company’s products or services sucked.
“We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade,” Ive recalled. They talked about how the knife’s good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured.
Products should be made to look pure and seamless.
He implemented the same hit strategy that made Apple so successful 15 years ago: make hit products and promote them with terrific marketing.